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ESSAYS 



NATURE AND CULTURE 



BOOKS BY MR. MABIE. 



MY STUDY FIRE. . 
MY STUDY FIRE, Second Series. 
UNDER THE TREES AND ELSE- 
WHERE. 

SHORT STUDIES IN LITERATURE. 
ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRE- 
TATION. 



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ESSAYS ON NATURE 

AND CULTURE^ BY ^f 
HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 






NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
MDCCCXCVI 



V 






Copyright, 1896, 

By Dodd, Mead and Company, 

All rights reserved. 



n-^his 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. 



TO 



JOHN BURROUGHS. 



CONTENTS. 



»AFTER. 
I. 


The Art of Arts . . . 


PAGE 

7 


II. 


Education . . . . 


i6 


III. 


Time and Tide 


26 


IV. 


Man and Nature . 


• 36 


V. 


The Race Memory , 


• 47 


VI. 


The Discovery to the Sense 


s 56 


VII. 


The Discovery to the Imagi 






nation 


. e-j 


VIII. 


The Poetic Interpretation 


. 78 


IX. 


The Moral Impress . 


88 


X. 


The Record in Language 


. 96 


XI. 


The Individual Approach 


106 


XII. 


Personal Intimacy 


117 


XIII. 


The Fundamental Corre 






spondences 


131 


XIV. 


The Creative Force . 


141 


XV. 


The Great Revelation . 


151 


XVI. 


Form and Vitality . 


161 





Contents. 




CHAPTER. 




PAGE 


XVII. 


The Method . 


: 172 


XVIII. 


Distinctness of Individuality 183 


XIX. 


Vital Selection . 


. 194 


XX. 


Repose 


. 207 


XXI. 


The Universal Life . 


220 


XXII. 


The Unconscious Life 


. 231 


XXIII. 


Solitude and Silence . 


• 243 


XXIV. 


Unhasting, Unresting 


• 253 


XXV. 


Health ..... 


264 


XXVI. 


Work and Play . 


• • 274 


XXVII. 


Work and Beauty 


. 284 


iXVIII. 


The Rhythmic Movemen' 


r . 295 


XXIX. 


The Law of Harmony 


• 304 


XXX. 


The Prophecy of Naturi 


• • 3H 



chapter L 

The Art of Arts. 

^ I ^HE supreme art, to which all 
-■" the arts rightly understood and 
used minister, is the art of living. 
At all times and in all places the 
materials of art are present; but the 
men who can discern the possible 
uses of these materials, and who pos- 
sess the instinct and the training to 
put them to these uses, are always 
few in number and often widely sep- 
arated in time. The material out of 
which art is made is everywhere; 
but the artist appears only at inter- 
vals. In like manner, the myste- 
rious force which we call life is put 
7 



The Art of Arts. 

into every man's hand ; but the men 
who discern its highest and finest 
possibilities, who get out of it the 
richest growth, and who put into it 
the noblest personal energy, are few 
in number. The great majority use 
life as the artisan uses his material ; 
a very small minority use it in the 
spirit and with the power of the 
artist. The artisan is often sincere, 
diligent, and fairly skilful ; but he is 
imitative, conventional, and devoid 
of creative power. The artist, on 
the other hand, is free, individual, 
constructive; he sees the higher pos- 
sibilities of the material which he 
commands, and the most delicate uses 
of the tools which he emplbys ; he 
discerns new meanings, evokes un- 
suspected powers, reveals fresh feel- 
ing, and gives the familiar and the 
commonplace a touch of immortal- 
8 



The Art of Arts. 

Ity by recombining or reforming it 
in a creative spirit. 

The art of living is the supreme 
art because it presents the widest 
range of material, and the most 
varied, delicate, and enduring forms 
of activity. Sculpture, painting, 
music, architecture, literature, taken 
together, are an expression of the 
human spirit realizing itself and its 
surroundings in the language of 
beauty ; morality is the attempt of 
the same spirit to discern and live 
in right relations to other human 
spirits ; religion, its endeavor to 
establish and sustain fellowship with 
the Divine Spirit ; philosophy, its 
effort to discover that final generali- 
zation which shall put that spirit 
in command of the order of the 
universe ; and history, the record of 
the struggle of that spirit to achieve 
9 



The Art of Arts. 

self-consciousness and self-mastery. 
For the real history of man is to be 
found in his creative works, — in 
Homer rather than in Thucydides ; 
in the " Divine Comedy" rather than 
in Villari, in Shakspeare's plays 
rather than in the works of Hume 
and Green. Whatever view of the 
authority of the Old Testament one 
may take, it is certain that in the 
noble literature which goes under 
that title there is a deeper, clearer, 
and fuller disclosure of the human 
spirit in its effort to realize itself 
and live its life than in all the his- 
torical works that have been written. 
For the real history of man on this 
earth is not the record of the deeds 
he has performed with his hands, 
the journeys he has made with his 
feet, the material things he has 
fashioned with his mind, but the 



The Art of Arts. 

record of his thoughts, feelings, in- 
spirations, aspirations, and experi- 
ence. It is the story of his spirit 
which is significant ; and the account 
of the things he has made and done 
is of value chiefly as these material 
products illustrate his spiritual activ- 
ity and development. The beauti- 
ful line on the Greek vase is of far 
higher value than acres of crumbling 
brick or stone in the vallevs of 
Asia, because the Greek was so 
much more the master of his mate- 
rials, and, therefore, so much more 
the artist than his contemporary in 
the farther East. 

The story of Athens, compara- 
tively weak and poor, is dearer to 
our hearts than the story of the rich 
and powerful Phoenician towns, be- 
cause it represents and embodies so 
much more intellect and soul. 



The Art of Arts. 

In a very deep sense poetry is 
truer than the chronicles, and the 
great epics tell us far more of the 
character and life of the' races which 
produced them than the most trust- 
worthy histories. 

Mythology, once relegated to 
nurseries or drawn upon for enter- 
tainment in the chimney corner, has ' 
become one of the most important 
contributions to the history of man, 
not because it has kept the record of 
fact, but because it registers a pro- 
foundly interesting stage of spiritual 
development. Although unhistorical 
as a chronicle of fact, it is eminently 
historical as a report of the dawning 
of great truths on the minds of 
primitive men. 

The interest in the human story 
centres, therefore, not on what man 
has done at any particular time, but 

12 



The Art of Arts. 

on what he has been ; not on the 
work of his hands, but on the dis- 
coveries of his spirit. It is not as a 
mere doer of deeds that he appears 
in the long record of history, but as 
a mysterious and many-sided spirit, 
striving to attain self-knowledge and 
self-development. If he were a mere 
doer of deeds, — a fighter, builder, 
colonizer, — his story would read like 
one of those old chronicles put 
together by faithful, plodding souls 
in the earlier periods of almost every 
modern literature, and which remain 
enduring examples of dry, literal, in- 
artistic fidelity ; but man is some- 
thing more than a doer of deeds, and 
the story of his life on earth, instead 
of being a dreary chronicle of unre- 
lated events, is a marvellous drama of 
thought, feeling, and action. It is a 
Shakspearian tragedy rather than a 
13 



The Art of Arts. 

mediaeval chronicle ; and the protago- 
nist in the great world play, on 
which the curtain is always rising 
and falling, is the human ^spirit striv- 
ing to understand and master itself, 
and to understand and master its 
surroundings by knowledge, by 
obedience, and by the forth-putting 
of the creative power. 

In this struggle for self-realization 
a few men become artists : they learn 
the possibilities o](^the materials with 
which they deal ; they put themselves 
into fruitful relations with the 
things which can nourish and the 
forces which can inspire them ; and 
they put forth the creative energy that 
is in them freely and continuously. 
They discover the educational quality 
of experience, the sustaining and 
teaching power of Nature, the cumu- 
lative force of training ; and they 
14 



The Art of Arts. 

work out their lives with intelli- 
gence, foresight, and resolute adjust- 
ment to the best conditions. They 
are not more prosperous than other 
men, so far as external fortunes are 
concerned ; but they are greater, 
nobler, and more masterful. Their 
supremacy lies in the fact that they 
are artists in the management and 
uses of life ; they are fresh in feeling, 
true in insight, creative in spirit, 
productive in activity. They live 
deeply and they produce greatly. 
( Such a man, despite all faults, was 
Goethe; a man who discovered in 
youth that life ought not to be a 
succession of happenings, a matter 
of outward fortunes, but a cumula- 
tive inward growth and a cumulative 
power of productivity, j 



15 



Chapter 11^ 

Education. 

T? VERY art has its own methods 
"^ of training, its distinctive dis- 
cipline, its secrets of experience and 
skill ; and mastery depends upon 
practice of these methods, submis- 
sion to this discipline, possession of 
the fruits of this experience, and 
command of this skill. Between 
the untrained man and the artist, in 
every department of creative work, 
there must be an educational process 
more or less severe and prolonged. 
This necessity is imposed on men of 
genius no less rigorously than on 
men of talent, and the exceptions 
will be found, on closer scrutiny, to 
i6 



Education. 

be apparent rather than real. In 
music, it is true, there have been 
boys of marvellous gifts, whose skill 
antedated all systematic training ; 
but even in such cases as that of 
Mendelssohn the early promise was 
late fulfilled in mature performance 
mainly because thorough training 
steadied, supplemented, and devel- 
oped a natural aptitude. In cases 
which are more to the point for the 
present purpose, — in such a case, 
for instance, as that of Burns, who 
wrote exquisite lyrics without any 
formal education for such delicate 
and difficult work, — the exclusion 
of a person from the operation of the 
law is apparent rather than real, and 
is explained by the very inadequate 
sense in whicn the word education is 
commonly used. 

For it is constantly assumed that 
17 



Education. 

education is a formal process, fol- 
lowing well-defined lines and carried 
on by academic methods ; while, as 
a matter of fact, education fs as indi- 
vidual as temperament and gift, and 
may take as many forms. A sound 
education is not a specific kind of 
training ; it is the training which 
qualifies pre-eminently for a specific 
kind of work. Artists especially 
need and employ the widest latitude 
of choice in the selection of educa- 
tional material and methods ; and, in 
the end, every genuine artist is self- 
educated. He has discovered, in 
other words, the methods which help 
him most efficiently to master the 
difficulties of his art and to command 
its secrets of skill. If the story of a 
gifted boy like Burns is read with 
insight, it will be found that he pre- 
pared himself for his work by an 
i8 



Education. 

education not the less definite and 
effective because it was wholly indi- 
vidual, personal, and unacademic. 
Burns discovered very early the hours, 
the places, the experiences, the moods 
which enriched and inspired him, 
and having discovered them he pur- 
sued and possessed them. This was 
his education ; and it was as genuine 
and thorough for its purpose as that 
which Milton found at Cambridge, 
and, later, in his Italian travels, or as 
that which his great successor, Ten- 
nyson, secured for himself two cen- 
turies after within the ivy-covered 
walls of the same venerable uni- 
versity. 

Lincoln's style is a constant mar- 
vel to those who have not studied 
his habits and career for the purpose 
of discovering his educational pro- 
cesses ; for such pieces of prose as 
19 



Education. 

the second Inaugural Address and 
the Gettysburg Address were never 
written or spoken without thorough 
and long-continued training. To 
those, however, who have made such 
a study, there is no mystery about 
Lincoln's command of lucid, flexi- 
ble, and beautiful English. If, as a 
boy, he had definitely thought out 
a method of training in the use of 
language, he could hardly have im- 
proved upon the simple expedients, 
the life-long habits, and the wonder- 
ful opportunities of practice which 
he employed or which came to him. 
No deep, great, productive quality 
or power comes to a man by acci- 
dent ; for, while the capacity for 
developing such a quality or power 
must be inborn, its unfolding de- 
pends not only on skill, but also 
upon character ; upon a general 
20 



Education. 

ripening of the nature, as well as 
upon the gaining of many kinds of 
dexterity. In the case of every man 
who uses such a power in a great 
and fruitful way, or develops such 
a quality on a noble and command- 
ing scale, there is some adequate 
kind of education ; for mastery 
comes only after obedience, service, 
and knowledge ; and greatness al- 
ways waits upon life. 

These truths have special signifi- 
cance where they are applied to the 
supreme art, the art of living. For 
this most difficult and comprehen- 
sive of all the arts rests upon laws 
as definite and certain in their opera- 
tion as the laws which underlie 
music, literature, sculpture, painting, 
or architecture; and no man can 
master this highest art without 
learning the nature of these laws and 

21 



Education. 

living by them. In order to secure 
from one's surroundings the most 
vital and enriching influence and 
power, and to give out the pur- 
est and most productive personal 
energy over the longest possible 
time, one must submit to the most 
severe and prolonged education. 
The greater the achievement, the 
more stern and long-sustained the 
training which prepares for it ; and 
since no achievement is so great as a 
rich, noble, and productive life, noth- 
ing exacts such heroic toil and 
patience as a preliminary condition. 
In the splendor of such a work as 
the " Divine Comedy " it is easy to 
forget the relentless bitterness of 
experience which deepened the poet's 
nature to the capacity of a vision 
of suffering and of redemption at 
once so appalling and so sublime. 

22 



Education. 

The path to such an achievement 
led, as the women of Verona de- 
clared, through the fires of hell. 
Looking at a career like Goethe's, 
so steadily productive, so varied in 
its interests, so wide in its activities, 
so commanding in its influence, one 
too easily overlooks the immense 
and tireless toil of a life which was 
without haste but which was also 
without rest. 

The process by which one be- 
comes an artist in the unfolding 
and use of his life is the process of 
self-culture ; of conscious effort 
towards the attainment of a clearly 
perceived end; of deliberate selec- 
tion of some influences and interests 
and deliberate rejection of others; 
of intelligent and sustained toil. In 
the pursuit of this highest art, as 
in the pursuit of the lesser arts, 
23 



Education. 

mastery never comes by nature or 
by chance; it comes always as the 
result of self-culture long and intelli- 
gently sustained and followed. 

In the common use of the word 
culture^ as in that of the word edu- 
catiorij there is an element of nar- 
rowness and untruth which must be 
eliminated before its true and rich 
meaning can be appropriated. For 
culture, instead of being an artificial 
or superficial accomplishment, is the 
natural and inevitable process by 
which a man comes into possession 
of his own nature and into real and 
fruitful relations with the world 
about him. It is never a taking on 
from without of some grace or skill 
or knowledge ; it is always an un- 
folding from within Into some new 
power ; the flowering of some qual- 
ity hitherto dormant; the absorp- 
24 



Education. 

tion of some knowledge hitherto 
unappropriated. The essence of 
culture is not possession of informa- 
tion as one possesses an estate, but 
absorption of knowledge into one's 
nature, so that it becomes bone of 
our bone and flesh of our flesh. It 
means the enrichment and expansion 
of the personality by the taking into 
ourselves of all that can nourish us 
from without. Its distinctive char- 
acteristic is not extent, but quality 
of knowledge ; not range, but vital- 
ity of knowledge ; not scope of 
activity, but depth of life. It is, in 
a word, the process by which a man 
takes the world into his nature and 
is fed, sustained, and enlarged by 
natural, simple, deep relations and 
fellowship with the whole order of 
things of which he is part. 



25 



Chapter III. 

Time and Tide. 

/^NE of the most perfect repartees 
ever made was that which came 
from that master wit, Alexandre 
Dumas, when, in answer to the 
question, " How do you grow old so 
gracefully ? " he replied : " Madam, 
I give all my time to it." The finer 
qualities and the higher achievements 
involve this element of time. They 
demand labor, they impose discipline ; 
but they depend, in the end, not 
upon toil or obedience, but upon a 
slow ripening. The man of culture 
is a man of ripe nature, — sound, 
sweet, mature. The crudity of haste, 
26 



Time and Tide. 

of exaggeration, of unformed taste, 
of servility to the fact, of deference 
to lower standards has gone out of 
him ; and in its place has come that 
slow, sure, complete maturing which 
resembles nothing so closely as the 
ripening of a fruit; that final ex- 
pression of the life of the tree, to 
which all its forces converge and in 
which its vitality bears a perfect pro- 
duct. The process by which a man 
absorbs the world into himself, so 
that it enriches and liberates him, is 
a vital and not a mechanical process ; 
and because it is vital it requires 
time, and is fulfilled by the long- 
continued and largely unconscious 
process of growth. 

Nothing brings into such clear 
relief the prevalent misconception of 
the meaning of culture as its identi- 
fication with diligence of acquisition 
27 



Time and Tide. 

or with studied pursuit of the graces 
and accomplishments of the intellec- 
tual life, instead of its identification 
with a process of growth patiently 
pursued for a life-time and as deeply 
rooted in the order of things as the 
growth of an oak. For genuine 
culture is not a cult or a fad, and 
does not create a select class sepa- 
rated from their fellows by superior 
delicacy of taste and greater refine- 
ment of habit ; it is the freeing of 
a man from the limitations of his 
temperament and conditions ; first, 
by the expansion of his nature by 
a vital knowledge of himself and the 
world, and next by bringing his spirit 
and methods into such harmony 
with the laws of life that his activity 
touches the highest point of intelli- 
gence, variety, and energy. Culture 
does not issue in a type reproduced 
28 



Time and Tide. 

in all its votaries, but in a more 
distinct and powerful personality. 

The master of the art of living 
must understand clearly the nature 
and the possibilities of the materials 
v/ith which he deals before he can re- 
combine or reform them with plastic 
freedom, or with the inspiring ease 
of the creative energy. To know 
the world and himself, therefore, is 
the first task of the artist in life; and 
this knowledge comes to him as 
the result of culture. It is a knowl- 
edge so deep, so rich, and so vital 
that it cannot be secured by any 
mechanical or purely intellectual 
process ; it involves the action of 
the whole nature ; of the imagina- 
tion, the emotions, the reason, the 
will. It is not a knowledge of 
things, but of life : to secure it is not 
an exercise of memory, but a putting 
29 



Time and Tide. 

forth of the soul. It is not to be 
had by conning text-books, although 
these have their uses ; it is to be had 
by living relationship with the thing 
one studiies. The master in any 
department is not he who has its 
facts at his fingers' ends, but he who 
commands its inward power and has 
the secrets of its perfection in his 
heart. There is, perhaps, no deeper 
distinction between men than that 
which exists in the quality and kind 
of their knowledge of their surround- 
ings. For some men see nothing 
but the shell of things, others con- 
stantly discern the soul ; to some 
everything is common, to others all 
things are uncommon. Shakspeare 
did not see a different world from 
that which his contemporaries looked 
upon ; he saw the same world with a 
clearer vision. That which to them 
30 



Time and Tide. 

seemed common and without signifi- 
cance, to him was full of meaning 
and shone or darkened with fate. 
He stood in vital relationship to his 
time and his fellows ; his contem- 
poraries stood in merely formal re- 
lationship with them. 

There is nothing which comes to 
a man comparable in interest, rich- 
ness, and beauty with this gradual 
absorption of the power and the 
knowledge of the world about him 
into himself by culture; by holding 
mind, heart, and soul open year after 
year to the influences that stream 
in, to the knowledge constantly 
proffered, to the exhaustless vitality 
which floods the world, and free 
access to which is just as much a 
privilege as the right to breathe the 
air or see the sky. The man who 
sets out to ripen his nature by con- 
31 



Time and Tide. 

tact with literature, for instance, 
must prepare himself for a long, 
arduous, and inspiring task. For 
he must not only familiarize himself 
with an immense number of literary 
works, but there must be in him a 
slow but ceaseless growth, constantly 
bringing him into closer contact 
with the men he studies ; until, at 
last, he stands on their plane, sees 
the world with their eyes, and so 
masters their secret. So far as compre- 
hension is concerned he stands on a 
level with them. But no one gains 
Dante's level without sharing in a 
measure Dante's experience. The in- 
tellectual equipment may be secured 
in a comparatively brief period, but 
the vital equipment comes only with 
the ripening years. It is idle to 
study Dante unless one lives up to 
and into his experience. There is, 
3^ 



Time and Tide. 

therefore, something in every art 
from which the immature student is 
absolutely shut out. No ardor of 
work can compass it, and no fervor 
of devotion snatch it before the pre- 
destined hour ; time, and time alone, 
brings it within reach of the eager 
hand. The man must ripen before 
he can possess the highest and the 
best. There is no toil more arduous 
than that of a life of aspiration ; but 
there is no toil which so soon be- 
comes play by that transformation 
which makes the task done by inten- 
tion the free and joyful outflow of 
one's native energy and force. 

We are slow to recognize and 
swift to disregard this necessity of 
growth in addition to that of work; 
but in every life expansion must 
supplement activity. We must lie 
fallow before we can produce greatly^ 
3 33 



Time and Tide. 

and we must enrich ourselves in- 
wardly before we can spend gener- 
ously in creative work. The length 
of the process varies with^the natural 
richness and openness of the individ- 
ual nature ; but no man, however 
gifted, escapes the process. The 
gradual ripening of Shakspeare is one 
of the most impressive facts in that 
spiritual biography which is written 
in his plays ; the youth who wrote 
" Romeo and Juliet " could not have 
written " The Tempest." The ripen- 
ing of years, rich in vital fellowship 
with life and men and nature, sepa- 
rates the ardent fancy of the earlier 
from the mature and splendid 
imagination of the later work. 
" Between Shakspeare in his cradle," 
says Mr. Higginson, "and Shak- 
speare in ' Hamlet ' there was 
needed but an interval of time ; " 
34 



Time and Tide. 

but that period of ripening and ex- 
pansion was as necessary to the writing 
of " Hamlet" as was the genius of 
the poet. To know the world vitally 
and creatively one must know it not 
only with the mind but with the 
soul ; one must live with it year by 
year, and slowly ripen as it yields 
that fruit of knowledge which grows 
only on the tree of life. 



35 



chapter IV. 

Man and Nature. 

' I ""HE material of culture is as 
wide and various as life itself; 
and to the man. who puts himself in 
right relations with his fellows and 
the world nothing is devoid of edu- 
cational quality. It is one of the 
characteristics of true culture that it 
not only adds steadily to one's 
knowledge, but as steadily develops 
the capacity for acquiring knowledge, 
and the instinct for discovering in 
every person, relation, event, and 
experience something of permanent 
value as a means of enrichment. 
And this process goes on until the 
36 



Man and Nature. 

great stream of life, as it sweeps past 
and eddies about the individual 
mind, becomes a true Pactolian river, 
bringing its wealth from a thousand 
sources and draining a world-wide 
experience for the enlargement of 
each open soul, When a man has. 
established such a relation with the 
order which surrounds him that 
every contact with that order dis- 
ciplines, informs, and broadens him, 
he has eome into harmony with the 
purpose which that order is working 
out, and has raised himself above the 
changes of external fortune and the 
happenings of the material life. 

Among the most important of 
these ministers to culture — religion, 
art, literature, science, human rela- 
tion$, activity, and experience — Na- 
ture holds ^ first place. For Nature 
antedates all the arts and sciences, 
37 



Man and Nature. 

and was involved in those earliest 
experiences which attended the main- 
tenance of the individual life before 
any social relations were possible. 
The intimacy between man and 
Nature began with the birth of man 
on the earth, and becomes each cen- 
tury more intelligent and far-reach- 
ing. To Nature, therefore, we turn 
as to the oldest and most influential 
teacher of our race ; from one point 
of view once our task-master, now 
our servant ; from another point of 
view, our constant friend, instructor, 
and inspirer. The very intimacy of 
this relation robs it of a certain 
mystery and richness which it would 
have for all minds if it were the 
reward of the few instead of being 
the privilege of the many. To the 
few it is, in every age, full of wonder 
and beauty ; to the many it is a 
38 



Man and Nature. 

matter of course. The heavens 
shine for all, but they have a chang- 
ing splendor to those only who see 
in every midnight sky a majesty of 
creative energy and resource which 
no repetition of the spectacle can 
dim. If, as has often been said, the 
stars shone but once in a thousand 
years, men would gaze, awe-struck 
and worshipful, on a vision which is 
not less but more wonderful because 
it shines nightly above the whole 
earth. In like manner and for the 
same reason, we become indifferent 
to that delicately beautiful or sub- 
limely impressive sky scenery which 
the clouds form and reform, com- 
pose and dissipate, a thousand times 
on a summer day. The mystery, 
the terror and the music of the 
sea ; the secret and subduing charm 
of the woods, so full of healing for 
39 



Man and Nature. 

the spent mind or the restless spirit; 
the majesty of the hills, holding in 
their recesses the secrets of light and 
atmosphere ; the infinite, variety of 
landscape, never imitative or repeti- 
tious, but always appealing to the 
imagination with some fresh and 
unsuspected loveliness ; — who feels 
the full power of these marvellous 
resources for the enrichment of life, 
or takes from them all the health, 
delight, and enrichment they have to 
bestow ? 

It is a great moment in a man's 
experience when he awakes to the 
wonder of the world about him, and 
begins to see it with his own eyes, 
and to feel afresh its subtle and pen- 
etrating charm. From that moment 
the familiar earth and sky become 
miracles once more, and his spirit 
is hourly recreated in their presence. 
40 



Man and Nature. 

There have been stern and heroic 
men to whom the beauty of the 
world has seemed to be a matter of 
indifference ; but such an indiffer- 
ence always involves a permanent and 
serious loss of breadth, knowledge, 
vision, and power. A man may get 
to his journey's end by the light of a 
lantern, but he is less secure than the 
man who travels by daylight ; and 
he loses the landscape. In the last 
analysis it will be found that the 
training and development of the hu- 
man mind have depended so largely 
upon Nature that no man can be 
said to have really compassed life or 
comprehended his own being who 
has failed to come into conscious 
relations with this greatest of teachers. 
It is certainly true that the exaggera- 
tion, the hardness, the limitation, the 
morbidness of so much mediaeval 
41 



Man and Nature. 

thought, and of the scholastic phi- 
losophy and theology which were its 
products, were due in large measure 
to the attempt to understand man 
isolated from his surroundings and 
to interpret his life apart from 
Nature. There is good reason to 
believe that man issued out of 
Nature by a long process of develop- 
ment; it is certain that Nature min- 
gled with his dawning life, and not 
only sustained but unfolded that life; 
and it is also certain that in body, 
mind, and soul man's life is so in- 
volved to-day with the life of Nature 
that the two are inseparable, and can- 
not be understood apart from each 
other. 

Man is incomprehensible without 
Nature, and Nature is incomprehen- 
sible apart from man. For the deli- 
cate loveliness of the flower is as 
42 



Man and Nature. 

much in the human eye as in its own 
fragile petals, and the splendor of the 
heavens as much in the imagination 
that kindles at the touch of their 
glory as in the shining of countless 
worlds. Nature would be incompre- 
hensible without her interpreter, — 
whose senses supplement her own 
wonderful being ; whose imagination 
travels to the far-off boundaries of 
her activity ; whose thought masters 
and demonstrates her order ; whose 
skill utilizes her forces ; and whose 
patient intelligence brought to bear 
century after century on her vast and 
all-embracing life, has not, it is true, 
uncovered the source of her vitality, 
but has gone far to discern its 
methods of manifestation. Man, on 
the other hand, cannot comprehend 
a single chapter of his history with- 
out appealing to Nature ; cannot 
43 



Man and Nature. 

trace a single developed faculty back 
to its rudimentary stage without find- 
ing Nature present at every step in 
that evolution and largely directing 
it ; cannot retrace the course of any 
skill, art, industry, trade, or occupa- 
tion without coming upon Nature at 
every turn. The story of his slow rise 
from barbarism to civilization is very 
largely the story of his contact with 
Nature ; and when he turns to his 
inward life and studies the religions, 
sciences, and arts by which he lives 
and expresses himself and his energy, 
he finds Nature everywhere present 
as the chief influence, the constant 
companion, or the authoritative and 
commanding teacher. 

This slow education of the race at 
the foot of Nature is not the only 
training to which men have been sub- 
dued, but it has been so constant, so 
44 



Man and Nature. 

gradual, so intimate, that by a true 
process of absorption man has become 
a part of Nature and Nature a part 
of man. They have lived together 
so many thousands of years, and in 
such substantial unity, that they are 
no longer separable. They are 
bound together in the great order or 
movement of the universe; the in- 
exorable obedience of Nature to the 
law of her being has become charac- 
ter in her companion and pupil ; the 
beauty of her landscape is repro- 
duced in his arts ; the changes of her 
seasons, which constantly set his life 
in a new framework, are recorded in 
his poetry; the majesty, mystery, 
and order of her manifold life under- 
lie his religions ; her products and 
forces sustain his life, spread the roof 
over his head, furnish the materials 
for all his fabrics, and turn the wheels 
45 



Man and Nature. 

which transform them into things of 
beauty and of use. All that man is 
and has done, has depended largely 
upon his relationship wi^th the sub- 
lime power which kindled the stars 
above the cradle of his infancy, and, 
now in his maturity, makes him mas- 
ter of forces which are lifting him 
above drudgery and making him 
poet, artist, and creator. 



46 



chapter V. 

The Race Memory. 

■\1S7HEN one strives to realize 
through the imagination what 
this intercourse between Nature and 
the race has been, and how much 
each individual owes to it, there rises 
in the heart not only a sense of awe 
and wonder, but a deep feeling of in- 
timacy and tenderness. Through a 
thousand forgotten channels each life 
has been nourished and expanded by 
a ministry which, beginning with the 
first man, is still untiring ; serving the 
welfare of the race, this ministry has 
still its special and peculiar teaching 
and fellowship for every member of 
that race. This unbroken associa- 
47 



The Race Memory. 

tion of man with the world about 
him gives unity and cumulative 
meaning to history, and unites us to 
the earliest times and the primitive 
men. We carry in our own natures 
the record of every sort of contact 
with Nature, and of every stage of 
the evolution of the soul. Nothing 
in the v/ay of experience is wholly 
novel to us, because at some period 
in our race-life we shared in it ; and in 
the depths below consciousness there 
is something which responds to the 
appeal of the happening which is new 
to the individual, but which is old 
to the race because it is part of that 
race memory to which all men have 
access. 

Born in cities and bred amid their 
stir and activity, we adapt ourselves 
swiftly to the habits of the moun- 
taineer, of the traveller in the desert, 
48 



The Race Memory. 

or the seafarer. Nothing Is really 
strange to us, and a brief period 
makes us at home in all conditions. 
Nothing that comes to a man is 
wholly unexpected, because it has 
already happened to men whose blood 
is in his veins ; no aspect of Nature 
is entirely unfamiliar, because at some 
time, in the history of some ancestor, 
we have touched Nature at every 
point and seen every phase of her 
manifold life. By virtue of our race 
relationship we have all been dwellers 
in huts ; woodsmen skilled in the 
secrets of wood-craft ; we have lived 
in virgin forests ; we have been at 
home in tents on great plains or 
burning deserts ; we have been sail- 
ors, explorers, fighters, colonizers. 
Nothing comes amiss to us, but every- 
thing awakens some response in us ; 
and nothing entirely unfamiliar hap- 
4 49 



The Race Memory. 

pens because everything has already 
happened. The American, making 
his first voyage, finds himself quickly 
adopting the habits, the mood, the 
language of the sea, because, centu- 
ries ago, he crossed the same sea, and 
in still earlier centuries his sail flitted 
by many a coast and was spread on 
many strange waters. In England 
he finds himself constantly striving 
to recall the vague and indistinct but 
very real background of his old-time 
life. Holland, Scandinavia, and Italy 
have surprises for him ; but the things 
that are novel seem to have come 
about since his last visit rather than 
to be the strange manners of hitherto 
unknown countries. 

Egypt, Syria, and the farthest East 

make him realize the long periods of 

time which separate him from his 

earlier knowledge of them. After a 

so 



The Race Memory. 

day of sight-seeing and a night of 
sleep, nothing is really strange ; it is a 
fresh reading of an old story. Travel 
becomes, therefore, not so much an 
exploration as a revival of recollec- 
tion ; a stirring of the memory. 

In like manner, no record of expe- 
rience appeals to us in vain ; there is 
always something in common between 
our own history and the most marvel- 
lous things that happen to other men 
and women. Children do not be- 
come accustomed to the variations of 
the fairy tale more readily than their 
elders to all the possible vicissitudes 
of life. We divine the deeper mean- 
ing of the myth because we once 
made myths ; we enter into the rush 
and unspent vitality of the national 
epic because our lives once passed 
through the stage which produced 
the epic as naturally as the soil pro- 
51 



The Race Memory. 

duces the plant and the tree ; the 
lyric, in all its keys and tones, sings 
to us as if it were but the vibration 
of our own souls, because every deep 
and passionate feeling which throbs 
in its soft or tumultuous music has at 
some time stirred within us ; the 
drama, in all its vast range, has no 
tragedy so sombre, no fate so dark, 
no incident so terrible, that in some 
past we may not match it with a kin- 
dred experience ; and fiction, search- 
ing so far and so patiently for the 
fresh fact, the novel condition, the 
unreported circumstance, is never able 
to surprise us beyond the passing 
moment. We have lived too long, 
travelled too widely, seen, felt, and 
done too much to be really taken 
unaware by any contemporary hap- 
pening or invention. The race has 
lived through all experiences, and the 
52 



The Race Memory. 

life of the race is in the very fibre 
of our hfe ; it is part of our sub- 
stance : we are, in large measure, 
what it has made us. Below our con- 
scious life abides the life of the race ; 
and our natures, in their hidden re- 
cesses, reverberate with the echoes of 
the entire past. 

A very large part of this universal 
life of humanity has been concerned 
with Nature ; and a very great part 
of those experiences which have made 
humanity what it is have come to men 
through their association with Nature. 
Whichever way we turn, therefore, 
when we attempt to retrace the steps 
by which we have come to our pres- 
ent condition, we are brought face to 
face with Nature; and there dawns 
upon us slowly something approach- 
ing an adequate impression of what 
this vague and indistinct but intensely 
53 



The Race Memory. 

real and overwhelmingly influential 
intimacy means, and how much is 
involved in it that is of the highest im- 
portance to us. When we look back 
and attempt to distinguish and enumer- 
ate the rills of knowledge, discipline, 
and power that have fed us, our lives 
seem like endless rivers, rising far back 
in the uplands of myth and tradition, 
and receiving, as they flow onward, 
tributaries from every mountain 
spring or meadow brook no less than 
from every sky that has stretched over 
them in their long course. There 
is a striking passage in one of the 
purest and freshest of modern love 
stories — Arthur Hugh Clough's 
" Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich " — 
which brings before the thought the 
range and sweep of a human life so 
far as its sources of influence and 
pov/er are concerned : — 
54 



The Race Memory. 

*' But a revulsion wrought in the brain and bosom 
of Elspie; 

And the passion she just had compared to the 
vehement ocean. 

Urging in high spring-tide its masterful way- 
through the mountains. 

Forcing and flooding the silvery stream, as it 
runs from the inland ; 

That great power withdrawn, receding here 
and passive. 

Felt she in myriad springs, her sources far in 
the mountains. 

Stirring, collecting, rising, upheaving, forth- 
out-flowing. 

Taking and joining, right welcome, that deli- 
cate rill in the valley. 

Filling it, making it strong, and still descend- 
ing, seeking. 

With a blind forefeeling descending ever, 
and seeking. 

With a delicious forefeeling, the great still 
sea before it ; 

There deep into it, far, to carry, and lose 
in its bosom. 

Waters that still form their sources exhaust- 
less are fain to be added. " 



55, 



Chapter VI. 

The Discovery to the Senses. 

' H ''HE education imparted by con- 
■^ tact with Nature is so inclusive, 
so deep, and so vital that from this 
point of view Nature seems to exist 
for the development of man. It is 
impossible to study the effect of 
human contact with the material, the 
forces, or the aspects of the world 
about us without perceiving the most 
striking results of every such contact 
on the minds, the hearts, and the 
souls. The old fable of Antasus gets 
a new meaning when we begin to 
grasp the enormous accession of in- 
telligence, power, and character which 
S6 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

has come to humanity as a result of 
intercourse with Nature. So marvel- 
lous are the adaptations of our sur- 
roundings to our educational needs 
that one cannot read far in the in- 
tellectual history of the race without 
recognizing the educational signifi- 
cance of life and the marvellous school 
in which that training is imparted to 
successive generations by methods of 
which those who learn are for the 
most part entirely unconscious. As 
a " middle term between man and 
God " Nature seems to furnish both 
the material and the methods neces- 
sary to the unfolding of the soul, 
and silently but imperatively to open 
man's life to the creative impulses 
and influences. 

This education, collective and 
cumulative in its rich results, is, 
of course, individual and personal in 
57 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

its processes. The immense deposit 
of knowledge, insight, discipline, and 
character which the race now holds 
as the result of an unbroken contact 
with Nature kept up through many 
centuries, was acquired and accumu- 
lated by individual experience and 
training. It is impossible, even in 
the dawning light which research has 
thrown upon primitive habits, man- 
ners, and ideas, to reconstruct the 
primitive educational processes. But 
in this field, as in so many others, 
a child must be our teacher ; and 
from the observation of the children 
about us we may learn many things 
about the thoughts and ways of those 
earliest men and women who were 
cast upon Nature as helpless and de- 
pendent as the child on its mother's 
breast. Whatever may have been 
the manner of their coming to the 
S8 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

perfect human condition, it is safe to 
assume that their unfolding was as 
gradual as that of children ; that it 
proceeded by slow stages from the 
lower to the higher, and was a matter 
of growth rather than a matter of 
acquirement.- If it be true, as seems 
probable, that the complete man rose 
out of Nature by a long process of 
evolution instead of being created 
above her, how marvellously close 
must have been the relationship be- 
tween man and Nature through 
countless centuries ! She is then in 
very truth, as the poets have held, 
our mother ; and all our desires for 
her, all the stirrings of the imagina- 
tion when we hear the murmurs of 
the deep woods or catch, far inland, 
the compelling tones of the sea, 
gain a deeper and more mysterious 
significance. 

59 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

But whatever the story of those 
forgotten centuries may be, it is clear 
that the first education men received 
from Nature was that v/hich came 
through the first great human experi- 
ence ; the discovery of the world in 
its relations, human need, and activity. 
The first men must have learned at 
the beginning that some actions were 
safe and others perilous ; that some 
things were good for food and others 
deadly ; that there were times, seasons, 
and an orderly progression ; that the 
body must be fed, sheltered, and 
clothed, and that the materials of 
food, clothing, and housing existed 
on every side ; that fruits were for 
eating, grass for cutting, and trees 
for building. The biography of the 
physical life may have been slowly or 
rapidly written, but it must have 
been written in terms of observation. 
60 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

Nature taught men, first of aJl, to 
see things, and then to make use of 
them. In this great school, observa- 
tion must have been the first lesson 
set for the learning of the earliest 
classes. The senses must have been 
developed and trained first ; the eye 
was taught to see, the ear to hear, 
the tongue to taste, the hands to feel, 
to shape, and to mould. So through 
a slowly broadened intelligence, which 
may only be hinted at here, men 
learned to see what was about them 
and to use it for their needs. All 
educational processes are in a sense 
contemporaneous, and it is impossible 
to educate the eye or the hand with- 
out educating the mind at the same 
time ; but in the earliest training the 
emphasis must have been upon ob- 
servation, and observation served as 
the first and most available means of 
6i 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

awakening the sleeping, or develop- 
ing the germinal soul of man. 

The discovery of the world to the 
senses, earliest of all the discoveries of 
Nature in point of time, is still in- 
complete, and is now the special 
function of science. If its progress 
could be separated from the general 
development of the race and written 
in a separate record, it would reveal 
a minute and unbroken training of 
all the senses of all men according to 
their ability and teachableness. That 
training is as much a part of the indi- 
vidual education of to-day as in the 
first years when men and Nature 
came in contact ; but it is no longer 
directed, as a rule, to the mere pre- 
servation of existence ; it has become 
a higher education and more distinctly 
realized resource. Nature is still 
ceaselessly observed and studied for 
62 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

food, shelter, clothing, and material 
support; but science watches and 
meditates not for bread and raiment, 
but for some new phenomena which 
may disclose the existence of a finer 
or subtler force, or hint at the opera- 
tion of an unsuspected law. And it 
is an impressive evidence of the edu- 
cational quality inherent in Nature 
that the more thoroughly the mind 
masters the facts of her manifold Hfe 
by appropriating the training of ob- 
servation, the more subtle and per- 
vasive become her forces ; so subtle 
and pervasive that they seem more 
akin to the spiritual than to the 
material. As men advance in edu- 
cational development, the educational 
materials and methods offered by 
Nature take on forms in harmony 
with the expanding intelligence. For 
Nature grows more marvellous as man 
63 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

learns more about her hfe, and meets 
each new out-reaching of inteUigence 
with the stimulus and inspiration of 
new vistas and outlooks. '' 

As she trained the earliest, so she 
trains the latest man who is willing 
to become a student in this great 
school. About every man's feet 
there lies this wonderland of force, 
life, law, and beauty which has min- 
istered so mysteriously and so vitally 
to the unfolding life of his race ; and 
that wonderland is open to every one 
who is willing to give the eye and the 
mind the training of observation. In 
the order of growth it is written that 
each man must discover the world 
for himself; he enters into the heri- 
tage of knowledge which humanity 
has slowly and painfully accumulated ; 
but if he would educate himself, he 
too must discover with his own eyes 
64 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

the world about him. To the be- 
ginner, as to the man whose sight has 
been suddenly restored, the world con- 
veys a great, confused mass of im- 
pressions ; but patient and persistent 
observation resolves this mass into a 
wonderful order, steadily widening, 
and constantly disclosing a richer 
and more inclusive beauty. The 
boy, in heedless pursuit of his sport, 
notices the existence of the fern ; 
the naturalist knows that there are 
hundreds of varieties of this plant, 
and they differ from each other, for 
the most part, only in a fairy-like 
rivalry of delicacy and beauty. To 
the untrained eye and ear the road- 
side is a mass of tangled shrubs ; to 
the trained eye it is a walk in that 
wild garden which one comes to love 
at last as he loves no bit of cultivated 
soil however ordered and kept. To 
S 6s 



The Discovery to the Senses. 

the untrained ear the forest is per- 
vaded by a confused murmur ; to the 
trained ear that murmur becomes a 
harmony of many clearly marked 
tones. The world steadily widens 
and grows in wonder and mystery 
to the man who forms the habit of 
observation ; it becomes at last not 
only an intimate friend, but a con- 
stant source of surprise and delight, 
— a new and inexhaustible resource. 
The cockney sees nothing in Na- 
ture ; Thoreau saw so much that he 
had no time for anything else. 



66 



Chapter VII. 

The Discovery to the Imagination. 

/^NE of the most striking and 
^-^ oppressive interpretations of 
Nature in modern literature is that 
to v/hich TourgueniefF has given the 
form of a prose-poem. The great 
writer imagines himself in a vast 
cavern, which is filled by the presence 
of a majestic womanly figure sunk in 
profound thought. 

" I soon guessed that this woman 
must be Nature herself; and a rev- 
erential fear, like a sudden shiver, 
penetrated my soul. 

" I approached her, and greeting 
her respectfully, I cried: *0 Mother 
67 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

of us all ! on what are you meditat- 
ing ? Are you perhaps thinking of 
the future fate of mankind, or of the 
long road that man must travel in 
order to reach the greatest possible 
perfection, the highest happiness ? ' 

" The woman slowly turned her 
dark terrible eyes, her lips moved, 
and with a thundering metallic voice 
she spoke : — 

" ' I am considering how to give 
greater strength to the muscles in a 
flea's leg, so that it may escape more 
easily from its enemies. The equi- 
librium between attack and defence 
is lost, and must be restored.' 

" * What ? ' stammered I. * Is that 
what you are thinking about ? Are 
not we men then your dearest, favor- 
ite children ? ' 

" The woman frowned slightly, and 
said : ' All creatures are my chil- 
68 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

dren; I care equally for you all, — and 
annihilate all without distinction.' 

" ' But virtue — reason — j ustice ? ' 
I stammered again. 

"'Those are human words/ re- 
sounded the brazen voice. ' I recog- 
nize no good or bad ; reason is no 
law for me ; and what is justice .? I 
gave you life; I take it from you 
and I give it to others, — worms or 
men, it is all the same to me ... . 
but as for thee, protect thyself for 
a while, and leave me in peace.' 

" I strove to answer, but the earth 
groaned and trembled, and I awoke." ^ 

Studied apart from the educational 
progress of humanity. Nature may 
appear impassive, indifferent, sub- 
limely inexorable; but studied in 
connection with the unfolding of the 

1 Poems in Prose ; Boston : Cupples, Upham 
&Co. 

69 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

soul of man, she appears everywhere 
sternly beneficent, austerely friendly ; 
for our friends are not those who 
flatter and pamper us, but those who, 
to recall Emerson's phrase, '* make 
us do what we can." From the be- 
ginning Nature has held men steadily 
to their tasks ; has compelled them 
to learn or to suffer, to observe or to 
perish. 

Primitive man was the slave of 
Nature by reason of his ignorance. 
One of the earliest representations 
of man now in existence portrays 
him fleeing, defenceless, naked, and 
panic stricken, from a great serpent ; 
he is without weapons, refuge, or de- 
vice. He is at the mercy of the 
weather, the sun, the malarial mist, 
the frost, the wild beast ; he has 
neither house, arrow, plough, vessel, 
nor medicine. But he has the capa- 
70 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

city for growth, and all the possibilities 
of power are in him. He observes, 
reflects, reasons ; and he slowly eman- 
cipates himself from his slavery to 
material conditions. He begins to 
see that his taskmaster is his teacher, 
and that his hardships and tasks are 
lessons which accomplish his libera- 
tion. He shelters himself from the 
weather by using the trees whose 
shadows once terrified him ; he kin- 
dles on his rude hearth the same fire 
which burns in the relentless sun ; 
he snatches clothing from the beasts 
which threatened him ; he makes 
weapons and tools ; he draws about 
him groups of animals and gives them 
domestic habits and tastes ; he breaks 
the sod and Nature feeds him with 
grain ; he builds ships and finds the 
mysterious and awful sea easier to 
traverse than the land, now that the 
71 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

winds have become his aids ; he mas- 
ters the greater forces, and they, too, 
become his ministers: so that his 
voice travels vast distances, his 
thought flies to the ends of the earth, 
he makes the whole world one great 
community, he lays upon Nature 
the tasks which once crushed him, 
and he becomes a man in soul as 
well as in body. He has learned his 
lesson, and emancipated himself from 
physical servitude by obedience, by 
observation, and by patience, skill, 
and character. 

This is the story of his relations to 
Nature on the material side ; and all 
this sublime education has its roots 
in the earliest observation, trained, 
broadened, and turned into thought. 
But with this education of the senses, 
resulting in the mastery of physical 
forces, there has gone on another edu- 
72 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

cation, bringing men into spiritual 
relations with Nature and bearing the 
fruit of a ripening and unfolding of 
the soul. This deep and beautiful 
relationship is suggested by Aubrey 
de Vere, in a passage of memorable 
beauty. Speaking of Wordsworth, 
he says : " How much the human 
mind conferred upon Nature, and 
how much Nature conferred upon 
the human mind, he did not affect to 
determine ; but to each its function 
came from God, and life below was 
one long mystic colloquy between 
the twin-born forms, whispering to- 
gether of immortality." 

The observation of the primitive 
man, like that of the child of to-day, 
did not end in the simple act of see- 
ing; it slowly gathered the facts 
which carried with them the infer- 
ence of law ; it awoke the imagina- 
73 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

lion, and religion, poetry, and art 
were born. It was impossible to see 
the world long without discerning 
order and sequence ; day followed 
night, and night, in turn, was suc- 
ceeded by day ; one season gave place 
to another, but always in a fixed 
order ; seed time carried with it the 
certain assurance of the harvest time ; 
a mysterious but certain regularity 
brought the stars to the zenith, the 
tides to the beach, the leaves to the 
trees. Slowly the great idea of law 
took shape, and the chief value of phe- 
nomena was no longer found in them- 
selves but in their illustration of the 
fixed and marvellous order of which 
they were part. Phenomena, at first 
so novel and perplexing, became sig- 
nificant of the forces behind them, 
and the vast material framework of 
the universe was soon to be the 
74 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

product of incalculable forces, which 
played through it, and vivified, sus- 
tained, and moved it on its mysteri- 
ous way. 

The discovery of the world to the 
senses was supplemented by the dis- 
covery of the world to the imagina- 
tion, and the education of men at the 
breast of Nature passed into another 
stage and took on a higher aspect. 
For the imagination is the faculty 
which sees behind the material phe- 
nomena the force which moves it, the 
law which governs it, and the spirit- 
ual fact which it symbolizes. When 
the imagination awoke, men began 
to look at the world no longer as 
a mass of detached impressions, a 
huge agglomeration of matter : they 
saw it as a whole ; they discovered 
order and law everywhere control- 
ling it ; they discerned the tide of 
75 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

vitality which mysteriously ebbed and 
flowed through it, making it a living 
organism instead of a ball of inert mat- 
ter ; the great idea of beauty shone 
from it ; its marvellous correspon- 
dence with their own lives was re- 
vealed; its strange analogy with their 
own growth, unfolding an inward 
experience, was disclosed. If the vast 
process, so briefly outlined, is real- 
ized with any degree of clearness, its 
educational significance and influence 
cannot be evaded. To see nat- 
ural phenomena so clearly and so 
steadily as to discern the law behind 
them ; to study them so intently as 
to penetrate to the force which flows 
through them ; to rise, by gradual 
generalizations of widening order, to 
the sublime and fundamental concep- 
tion of ultimate unity ; to pass be- 
yond this to the secondary and spir- 
76 



The Discovery to the Imagination. 

itual meaning of the universe; and to 
perceive how perfectly and com- 
pletely, in force, phenomena, law, and 
beauty it reproduces and interprets 
the life of man; — this is surely the 
real education of the human race, and 
in the fulfilling of this function and 
the working out of this relationship 
is to be found the key to the story 
of man's intercourse with Nature ; 
and in the light of this interpreta- 
tion is to be discerned also the true 
conception of Nature herself. 



77 



Chapter VIII. 

The Poetic Interpretation. 

' I ''HE discovery of the world to 
the imagination marks the 
beginning of poetry, art, and relig- 
ion ; for the immediate fruit of that 
discovery was mythology, and in 
mythology is to be found the first 
attempt of men to pass beyond 
observation to explanation, and to 
interpret the world about them 
in terms of their own experience. 
It was " the earliest form in which 
the mind of the pagan world dis- 
cerned the universe and things di- 
vine ; " it was the sublime vision of 
the fundamental meaning of material 
78 



The Poetic Interpretation. 

things revealed to the childhood of 
the race. The physical order, with 
its variety and beauty, sank deep 
into the hearts of primitive men, and 
gradually they began to discern the 
law behind the phenomena and the 
truth behind the fact, and to repre- 
sent these large conceptions in con- 
Crete form. The myth, unlike the 
legend or the popular story told 
generation after generation for enter- 
tainment, represents a serious effort 
of the mind of the race, and was the 
product of one of the most signifi- 
cant and important stages of its 
development. For it marks the 
second and spiritual contact of men 
with Nature ; the discernment, on 
their part, that the great order about 
them embodies and reveals great 
truths as truly as it discloses incalcu- 
lable forces; and that, in very deep 
79 



The Poetic Interpretation. 

and wonderful ways, it symbolizes 
and illustrates their own experience. 
The myth, unlike the legend, is 
an explanation of natur-al processes 
and phenomena, or a dramatic repre- 
sentation of the inward or outward 
experience of the men who fashioned 
it. The first discovery of Nature was 
made by the senses, and bore its fruit 
in all manner of physical and mate- 
rial adjustments ; the second discov- 
ery was to the imagination, and bore 
its fruit in general interpretations, 
in spiritual conceptions, and in po- 
etic stories. Men began to feel 
the mysterious fellowship between 
Nature and themselves ; and the 
education eifected by that fellow- 
ship passed into its secondary stage. 
The recurring phenomena of day 
and night began to stir the imagina- 
tion and to suggest marvellous an- 
80 



The Poetic Interpretation. 

alogies to human experience. The 
miracle of the dawn, stealing silently 
out of the bosom of the night ; the 
splendor of noonday, with its con- 
tests between sun and cloud ; the 
dip of the sun behind the western 
hills; the splendor of the afterglow, 
slowly fading into darkness ; — 
these constant phenomena of the 
world's life sank deep into the con- 
sciousness of the childhood of the 
race, and the imagination responded 
with a rich growth of poetic stories, 
in which these phenomena of the 
visible world were not only ex- 
plained, but were made to symbolize 
the phenomena of the inner world 
of man's nature and life. Like the 
children of to-day, whose habits of 
mind they largely shared, these 
children of long ago projected them- 
selves into the world about them, 
6 8i 



The Poetic Interpretation. 

imputing personality and will to 
inanimate things, and peopling the 
earth and the sea with beings some- 
times touched with divinity, and 
sometimes allied to the brute nature 
and the brute forces. When they 
endeavored to explain what they saw 
about them, instead of framing a 
scientific theory, as we should do, 
they created a myth. The thunder- 
storm, which to us sus;gests certain 
electrical and atmospheric condi- 
tions, brought before their eyes and 
minds the figure of a dragon, at 
which the heavenly archer was direct- 
ins his swift and flashing- arrows. 
Under countless names and disguises 
the sun wanders over the earth, per- 
forming great labors, undergoing 
terrible fatigues, facing appalling 
perils, overcoming relentless foes. 
Passed through the imagination of 
82 



The Poetic Interpretation. 

childhood, "the perennial story of 
the world's daily life," to use Mr. 
Tylor's phrase, reappears in a series 
of stories as widespread as the habi- 
tations of man, as varied as his fancy 
could invent, as deep, as vital, and as 
true as his thought and intelligence 
permitted. 

The mythologies of the Hindus, 
the Greeks, and the Norsemen con- 
tained the germinal science, poetry, 
and religion of those races ; they ex- 
plained Nature; and they represented 
human life as felt and understood by 
these different peoples. The Norse 
mythology especially is a fairly com- 
plete dramatic account of the life of 
Nature and of the gods and men 
involved in that life ; and it is also 
a fairly complete representation of 
human experience in concrete dra- 
matic form. For the myth is some- 
83 



The Poetic Interpretation. 

thing more than an explanation or 
representation of natural phenomena ; 
it is a dramatic statement of the 
experience and life of the men who 
fashioned it. Once aroused, the 
imagination did not rest in the en- 
deavor to interpret the external 
world ; it passed on into the region 
of man's inner consciousness and 
strove to picture him to himself. 
The heroes who perform such won- 
derful feats are not only masks of 
the sun ; they are also masks of 
the human soul in the vicissitudes 
and struggles of its life ; they are 
the sublime or beautiful images of 
himself which man projected into 
the world about him. For myth- 
ology not only personifies Nature ; 
it also idealizes man. As the hero, 
constantly facing foes and overcom- 
ing them, constantly confronted by 
84 



The Poetic Interpretation. 

obstacles and surmounting them ; as 
the wanderer, seeking everywhere 
for some person or thing lost or 
longed-for, — the human soul finds 
its dramatic representation in a thou- 
sand forms and its fortunes pictured 
in a thousand adventures. 

For the function of the imagina- 
tion is twofold : to see things in 
their essential nature and their uni- 
versal relations, and to give them 
concrete form ; to turn these abstract 
ideas or purely material forms into 
beautiful or striking images. To the 
senses, by observation alone, the 
world might have seemed a great 
piece of mechanism ; to the imagina- 
tion it was a great living organism, 
— flooded with life, charged with 
energy, fecund, reproductive, creat- 
ive. So vital was it, in the vision 
of those old-time children, that every 
8S 



The Poetic Interpretation. 

wood and stream was peopled with 
beings after their own kind ; in every 
sea there was a beautiful race akin to 
the wave, the storm, and the light; 
in every forest a race allied to the 
ancient solitude, the sacred silence, 
the brooding duskiness and mystery. 
Man and Nature were so intimately 
related that it was no forcing of 
thought or speech to pass from one 
to the other; to impute to Nature 
the thought and will of man, or to 
discover in the aspects and move- 
ments of Nature the counterparts of 
the aspects and movements of the 
life of man in the midst of Nature. 
In this poetic epoch, when the imag- 
ination was playing freely with the 
material which observation had accu- 
mulated, men looked upon Nature 
and saw everywhere the same play of 
forces which they felt in themselves ; 
86 



The Poetic Interpretation. 

more than this, they saw themselves 
projected in sublime figures and par- 
ticipating in a world-struggle, sym- 
bolized day by day in the heavens, 
and shared alike by Nature and her 
human children. For Nature, in the 
prophetic vision of childhood, was as 
she will some day become in the 
vision of science, — a sublime anal- 
ogy of the growth of man. 



87 



chapter IX. 

The Moral Impress. 

'T~^HE education which has bden 
^ described did not stop with the 
training of the senses and the awaken- 
ing of the imagination ; it penetrated 
the moral nature and bore the fruit 
of character. For men are organic 
units, not bundles of faculties, and it 
is impossible to train any faculty with- 
out influencing and affecting the man 
in every part of his nature. The 
character formed may not conform 
to the type which seems to us sound- 
est and highest, but it is very certain 
that every serious contact with Nature 
leaves its impress in character, and 
88 



The Moral Impress. 

that the moral nature preserves the 
record of the long educational process. 
Men are to-day, In character no less 
than in faculty, very largely what 
Nature has made them, and there is 
truth in Walter Savage Landor's fine 
lines : — 

" We are what suns and winds and waters make us; 
The mountains are our sponsors, and the rills 
Fashion and win their nursling with their smiles." 

There is truth in these lines, not 
only because of the inevitable influ- 
ence upon us of surroundings which 
are constantly present in our senses 
and thought, but because of our 
active and positive relations with 
these surroundings. Our dealings 
with Nature are passive only so long 
as her varied life presents itself to us 
as a spectacle ; and even in this neu- 
tral relationship there is a certain in- 
evitable education. Mountains, seas, 
89 



The Moral Impress. 

and sky do not leave the dullest man 
entirely untouched by their influences. 
The moment we begin to deal with 
Nature actively or directly our rela- 
tions become positive, and a powerful 
influence begins to play upon us. 
Primitive men did not discover that 
shelter was necessary to protect them 
from storms ; that clothing was needed 
to preserve them from cold, food from 
starvation ; that fire made the making 
of tools and implements possible ; 
that some fruits were good for food 
and some were poisonous, v/ithout 
receiving a moral training evidenced 
by character. For men cannot grow 
in knowledge, and cannot utilize 
knowledge when they have acquired 
it, without developing certain qualities 
which are the moral deposit of the 
serious use and direction of their 
faculties. Patience, persistence, self- 
90 



The Moral Impress. 

denial, self-restraint, endurance, and 
the will to work lie at the foundation 
of all human development, and were 
the direct results of the earliest 
contacts with Nature. The moral 
quality is universal in spite of our 
scepticism, and men cannot stand in 
direct relations with the world at 
any point without receiving moral 
influence and training. The moral 
quality is in the soil under our feet ; 
and a man cannot seriously care for 
fifty acres of land without insensibly 
forming a character. He will learn 
to watch the seasons and to make 
the most of them ; he will slowly 
master the secrets of farming ; but 
he will also become steadfast, endur- 
ing, vigilant, master of his moods, 
his inclinations, and his disposition. 
He will learn that great lesson of 
subordination to the conditions of 
91 



The Moral Impress. 

success which is the inevitable moral 
product of serious application to a 
task. In the end he will get a greater 
moral than material ret-urn from his 
stubborn acres ; and, if he is wise, 
he will discover that Nature returns 
something better than fruits and grains 
for the work of man, and that every 
hour of real toil leaves its- impress 
on the soul of the toiler. 

No more heroic toil has been 
borne by man than that which has 
been involved in the long process inac- 
curately described as, " subduing Na- 
ture ; " for Nature is never subdued ; 
it is man who is subdued by subordi- 
nating himself to the conditions which 
protect the discovery of every natural 
law, the use of every natural force, 
and the possession of every natural 
product. Nature gives nothing to 
man but beauty, and beauty is really 
92 



The Moral Impress. 

given only to those who open their 
minds and hearts by education to per- 
ceive and receive it. Nature treats 
man from the beginning as a moral 
being ; she respects his independence 
and recognizes his equality with her- 
self. She refuses to pauperize him by 
easy prodigality, to weaken him by 
putting into his hands forces and 
treasures the uses of which he has not 
been trained to understand. On the 
contrary, she insists upon the plant- 
ing of the seed before bestowing the 
harvest ; on the cutting of the tree 
before the building of the house ; on 
the tunnelling or blasting before the 
discovery of the metals ; on long and 
patient experimentation before the 
using of steam or electricity ; on 
patient and exact observation before 
the discernment of the law. In every 
relation, at every point, character is the 
93 



The Moral Impress. 

inevitable result of any serious con- 
tact between men and Nature ; and 
the establishment of every such rela- 
tionship is so hedged about with moral 
requirements that it seems at times 
as if the moral result were the real 
end to which all intercourse between 
men and Nature tends* and as if all 
material products and results were 
only tokens and measures of moral 
value. It is impossible to study this 
aspect of man's relations with Nature 
without a deepening conviction of the 
presence of a vital and universal edu- 
cational quality and purpose in that 
relation ; a quality and purpose which 
go far to show what Nature really is. 
The slowly and painfully acquired 
patience, endurance, self-denial, and 
self-surrender which have accompa- 
nied the gradual but cumulative 
mastery of natural phenomena, fact, 
94 



The Moral Impress. 

law, and force by men forms the 
moral foundation upon which society 
ultimately rests ; it is not a complete 
moral education, but it has made 
such an education possible ; and it 
has become so much a part of the 
very texture of man's soul and life 
that it binds him to Nature not 
through his senses only, or through 
his imagination alone, but by means 
of that which is deepest and most 
enduring in himself. The fellowship 
of the race with Nature is not only 
witnessed in the self-restraint and 
self-denial by the exercise of which 
society exists to-day, but it survives 
in each individual in that moral in- 
heritance which is the most precious 
bequest which we have received from 
the toiling, suffering, enduring past. 



9S 



chapter X. 

The Record in Language. 

np'HE impress of Nature upon 
man is not only discoverable 
in the deeps of consciousness and in 
the bases of character ; it shines also 
on the very surface of all human 
speech. Men could not, in the nature 
of things, absorb through their senses 
and imagination the beauty and sig- 
nificance of the world about them 
without reproducing this pervasive 
influence in every form of speech. 
The ages in which they were making 
discovery of Nature were the ages in 
which they were also creating lan- 
guage, — that most marvellous of all 
96 



The Record in Language. 

the things they have made. Words 
are so familiar that we have largely 
lost their first associations, their pri- 
mary meanings ; but when we re- 
cover these for a moment, the " faded 
metaphor" glows again with the 
light of its earliest poetic substance. 
Indeed, it is only when we rescue lan- 
guage from the insensibility to its far- 
reaching relationships brought about 
by constant use that we realize how 
poetic the language-makers were, and 
how great a part the imagination 
played in the making of language. 
For language is not only largely 
faded metaphor, but it is largely 
a product of man's thought about 
Nature. The more closely it is stud- 
ied the more intimate the intercourse 
between men and Nature is seen to 
have been, and the more distinct 
becomes the fact that Nature not 
7 97 



The Record in Language. 

only educated men in all manner of 
skills and arts, but that she furnished 
them with complete illustration of 
their inward life by analogy, symbol, 
and vital processes of every kind. 

So closely do we stand to the 
material order about us, and so fun- 
damental is the correspondence be- 
tween that order and the facts and 
processes of our lives, that prime- 
val men did not separate them in 
thought. Nature was divine to them, 
as she will become again to their 
later descendants, because she was 
part of themselves ; without her they 
could not have understood what was 
going on within their own souls ; 
without the aid she offered them they 
would have been powerless to ex- 
press themselves. They had not 
made that distinction between matter 
and spirit, which, as commonly un- 
98 



The Record in Language. 

derstood_, has brought so much con- 
fusion into thought by making spirit 
vague and unreal, and matter dead 
and sensual. 

Science has been radically chang- 
ing this conception of matter of late 
years, until the materialistic idea of 
the world is swiftly fading in the 
presence of a conception which has 
not only spiritualized matter, but is 
fast bringing back the world to the 
place given it by the earliest men. 
They rested unconsciously in that 
unity to which we are slowly working 
our way back through more intimate 
and exact knowledge. In the child- 
hood of the race, when all things were 
explained by the imagination, and men 
projected themselves into Nature 
as freely and as unconsciously as they 
looked at the stars or listened to the 
sea, the outward material fact seemed 
99 



The Record In Language. 

the necessary picture or symbol of the 
inward spiritual process, and Nature 
was the great parable by which man 
explained himself and fashioned an 
adequate instrument of expression of 
himself. 

In Nature he found the constant 
illustration of his intellectual, moral, 
and emotional life. His language 
was, therefore, a series of metaphors 
suggested by natural facts or by his 
relations to them. To do right was 
not, in his thought, an abstract 
thing; it was going in a straight 
line: and to do wrong was similarly 
concrete, for it was to take a crooked 
course. Spirit, so often elusive and 
intangible to modern men, was the 
wind to him; something unseen, but 
unmistakably real ; invisible, but of 
vast range of power ; intangible, but 
all-pervasive. 



The Record In Language. 

The words which are borrowed 
from natural phenomena or processes, 
to express spiritual phenomena or 
processes, are numberless ; they form 
the base of every language. But the 
intimacy of men with Nature is evi- 
denced not less impressively by the 
great series of metaphors which bring 
before the mind the spirit or char- 
acter of a man, a thought, a feel- 
ing, or an action, by reference to some 
appearance or fact of Nature. The 
world over, in figure, fable, and para- 
ble, Nature is drawn upon to set in 
clear, strong light human character 
and action. The wolf is everywhere 
the synonyme for hunger and want, 
the fox for cunning, the ox for 
patience, the eagle for audacity, the 
lion for strength, the serpent for 
malice. In lijce manner, the higher 
and subtler ideas find their most strik- 

lOI 



The Record in Language. 

ing and effective illustrations in nat- 
ural phenomena. In all languages 
the sky is the symbol of purity, vast- 
ness, inclusiveness ; the, sea, of rest- 
lessness ; the mountain, of solidity 
and majesty; the stars, of clearness 
and fixity ; light and darkness, of good 
and evil, of ignorance and knowledge. 
So general and so constant is the 
use of these figures that they form 
a kind of universal element in all 
languages ; and the more we study 
them, the more clearly do we per- 
ceive that Nature has furnished man 
with a complete commentary on him- 
self, and that language is a sublime 
registry of an intimacy once so close 
and so long continued as to consti- 
tute a substantial unity between those 
who shared it. 

As thought clarifies, and deals 
more and more definitely with the 

102 



The Record in Language. 

spiritual aspects of man's life, Nature 
does not recede, but advances with 
still deeper and more wonderful illus- 
tration of these higher phases of the 
life of her children. Homer had a 
notable gift for vivid illustration 
from Nature, and the " Iliad " espe- 
cially is lighted from beginning to 
end with bold or beautiful meta- 
phors. But it is in the Bibles of 
the race, in the Old Testament and 
the Vedic Hymns, that Nature 
matches the loftiest thought of man. 
In these great revelations of the 
human spirit the obvious illustra- 
tions, which children still discover 
in their games, give place to the per- 
ception of that profounder meaning in 
phenomena and process which makes 
Nature one great and luminous sym- 
bol of the life of man. When the 
mind has passed through the earlier 
103 



The Record in Language. 

stages of observation by the senses 
and discovery through the imagina- 
tion, there dawns on man a vaster and 
deeper conception of the world about 
him and of his relation to it. The 
order, the force, the beauty, the sub- 
limity of that world become the gar- 
ment of God to him ; and in this 
unspeakable splendor which enfolds 
him he sees the sublime pageant of 
a life not less divine than his own, 
and flooding him on every side with 
light on his own nature and destiny. 
In this stage of his growth Nature 
enters his speech in a thousand forms, 
to help him express the highest 
thought that is in him. Stars, 
mountains, seas, the infinite heavens, 
become then the obvious symbols 
of the life of the spirit. In the 
book of Job the universe moves be- 
fore the imagination as with the 
104 



The Record in Language. 

breath of God ; and in the New Tes- 
tament, when Paul — that great poet 
struggling with the prose of a dia- 
lectic period — would picture man in 
the mysterious and awful transfor- 
mation from the earthly to the 
heavenly, he invokes the aid of 
Nature, and carries conviction in the 
familiar image of one of the most 
familiar natural processes, — "it is 
sown a natural body ; it is raised a 
spiritual body." 



105 



chapter XI. 

The Individual Approach. 

'nr^HE educational quality involved 
"*■ in human intercourse with Na- 
ture, and the resultant intelligence, 
training, discipline, character, and 
development, have been very inade- 
quately suggested in the preceding 
chapters. The attempt has been 
made to bring into view the natural 
background of the human spirit, and 
to hint at some of the methods by 
which Nature, in phenomena, force, 
law, and symbol, has sunk deep 
into human consciousness, and has 
been reflected in human skills, arts, 
sciences, and religions. To de- 
io6 



The Individual Approach. 

scribe with any degree of fulness 
what men have learned from Nature 
would involve teUing the story of the 
unfolding of the human spirit; to 
describe it accurately would involve 
a recapitulation of the sciences. It 
has been suggested in large outline 
and as it takes account of the race, 
for the purpose of bringing into 
clearer light the ways by which the 
individual man may bring himself 
into fruitful educational relations with 
Nature. 

For it is profoundly true, as Froe- 
bel has said, that the history of the 
race is the true educational material 
for the unfolding of the individual life ; 
because the race has passed through 
every phase of growth and experience 
which the individual passes throuph. 
It has had its period of infancy, with 
all the limitations of ignorance and 
107 



The Individual Approach. 

weakness which make the horizon of 
infancy so narrow and its perils so 
great ; it has had to learn by painful 
and slow observation and experience 
what Nature is and what Nature can 
do for man. It has had its period 
of youth, with the tidal wave of life 
and passion steadily mounting, and 
the imagination playing like a kin- 
dling and spreading flame over the 
entire surface of its knowledge and 
activity ; and in the moment of 
discovery to the imagination it has 
dreamed the beautiful and prophetic 
dreams of mythology. It has had 
its period of maturity, with the trained 
eye and hand, the clear intelligence, 
the disciplined will ; and its more ex- 
act and arduous studies have created 
that ordered and tested knowledge 
which we call science. In the un- 
folding of each individual life these 
1 08 



The Individual Approach. 

periods succeed each other in the 
order which they followed in the 
development of the race ; so that 
every phase of the universal life has 
a deep and vital meaning for the 
particular life, and a man is really 
educated in the degree in which he 
comprehends and shares the life of 
the race. Training makes for skill, 
discipline for character, and the ac- 
quirement of knowledge for intelli- 
gence ; but these processes never bear 
their ripest fruit until they pass on 
into culture, and become, through 
vital assimilation, part of the man 
himself. To enter into the life of 
the race through its history, its arts, 
its science, and its religion is to come 
into such vital relations with it that 
its experience becomes ours as truly 
as if we had passed through it. In 
this way Shakspeare possessed him- 
109 



The Individual Approach. 

self of the experience of the Greek, 
the Roman, the Egyptian, the Italian, 
and the Englishman of an earlier age ; 
in this way Dante mastered the secret 
of mediaevalism ; in this way Haw- 
thorne discerned the spirit of Puri- 
tanism in its personal struggle with 
temptation and sin. 

The experience of the race in its 
intercourse with Nature is preserved, 
as has been said, in the elementary 
training of its instincts, and in the 
deepening and widening of its intelli- 
gence recorded in its sciences, arts, 
skills, and religions ; this great history 
is open to the individual student, and 
he will learn to read it with intelli- 
gence in the degree in which he 
comes into personal relations with 
Nature ; for while the general ex- 
perience broadens and deepens the 
particular experience, the particular 



The Individual Approach. 

experience must precede or accom- 
pany the endeavor to master the 
general experience by acting as its^ 
interpreter. When a man gains per- 
sonal knowledge of Nature he begins 
to see what Nature has done for all 
men. To establish these personal 
relations, to come into direct contact 
with Nature, is, therefore, one of the 
chief ways of mastering the secret 
and mystery of the development of 
man in this world. It is, however, 
much more than this ; for it is one 
great method of so broadening, en- 
riching, and nourishing the individual 
that he becomes a master of life and 
its forces. The knov/ledge which a 
man may gain, directly and indi- 
rectly, by observation, imagination, 
absorption, and self-surrender from 
Nature, makes him an artist in the 
use and treatment of his life by put- 
III 



The Individual Approach. 

ting him in possession of the richest 
material, by placing him in the best 
conditions, and by developing and 
directing the activity of ^his whole 
nature. 

There are some men to whom inti- 
macy with Nature in her obvious as- 
pects and forms appears to be an 
inheritance ; they are born into it, and 
are never conscious of the hour from 
which it dates. Their eyes see the 
world about them with a clearness 
and accuracy of observation which 
turns their hours of play into uncon- 
scious study of science. Flowers, 
trees, shrubs, birds, and animals seem 
akin to them, and are recognized at 
first sight, and put in their proper 
place and order. Other men, faihng 
of this birth-gift and missing the train- 
ing of the senses in childhood, must 
slowly and of set purpose piece out a 

112 



The Individual Approach. 

defective power of observation by- 
habits formed in maturity. This in- 
troductory relationship with Nature is 
a resource of inexhaustible delight and 
enrichment ; to establish it ought to 
be as much a part of every education 
as the teaching of the rudiments of 
formal knowledge ; and it ought to 
be as great a reproach to a man not 
to be able to read the open pages of 
the world about him as not to be 
able to read the open page of the 
book before him. It is a matter of 
instinct with a few ; it may be a 
matter of education with all. Even 
those who are born with the eyes 
and ears of naturalists must reinforce 
their native aptitude by training. 

After a time the habit of exact 
observation is formed, and the con- 
scious observation becomes uncon- 
scious. " The ear can be taught to 

8 113 



The Individual Approach. 

discriminate among sounds," says 
Mr. Burroughs, "just as the sense 
of touch gives us varied impressions 
through our finger-tips. I think I 
do this discriminating unconsciously. 
If I hear a sound, it requires no effort 
to decide what it is, — whether a bird- 
cry, song, or call, or the drone of some 
insect. Every sound has a meaning. 
Ton must be able to take a hint ; that 
is the great secret of observing Nature. 
You must see what is going on, and 
draw conclusions. I visited, some 
months ago, the grave of Phillips 
Brooks at Mount Auburn Cemetery, 
and while I was there I found a 
bird's nest at the foot of his grave. 
The way I found it was this : I heard 
the cry of a bird in distress, and when 
I looked about I saw a little chicka- 
dee with food in its beak. That was 
hint enough." Mr. Burroughs has a 
114 



The Individual Approach. 

genius for observation ; but while the 
great mass of men can never gain 
his acuteness and felicity of vision, 
education In observation will unfold 
the world to every one who is willing 
to submit to a training which brings 
its constant reward with it. Without 
this training no one can really see 
Nature in her varied aspects and her 
familiar and obvious life ; and it is 
the good fortune of modern men that 
a growing literature of natural obser- 
vation furnishes stimulus and end- 
less suggestion for such an education. 
Such writers as Gilbert White, Tho- 
reau. Burroughs, and Jefferies — to 
make no mention of manuals and text- 
books prepared for this specific pur- 
pose, — open the natural world to one 
who has remained ignorant of it, and 
suggest the methods by which one 
may repeat in his own experience the 
"5 



The Individual Approach. 

first steps in observation which the 
race took so long ago, and upon 
which so large a part of its knowl- 
edge, character, and achievements 
ultimately rest. 



ii6 



Chapter XII. 

Personal Intimacy. 

•* I ^HE delight which comes to the 
•^ naturalist in his growing ac- 
quaintance with tree, flower, beast, 
and bird ; the sense of exhilaration 
which the scientist feels as he passes 
from the lesser to the greater law 
and discerns an ever widening order ; 
the thrill which stirs the imagination 
of the artist as he discovers a deep- 
ening beauty in the world about 
him ; — these are great and real 
resources, but they are, in a sense, 
the resources of a limited number of 
men and women. The technical 
117 



Personal Intimacy. 

training essential to the naturalist, 
the scientist, and the artist is beyond 
the reach of a multitude to whom 
Nature is accessible, but' the weight 
of whose work must be put else- 
where. One may have something of 
each of these great knowledges, and 
add to it year by year until it be- 
comes measurably adequate ; but one 
can never master any one of them 
unless he gives his life to it. 

There is another kind of know- 
ledge of Nature, however, which is 
not only possible to most men and 
women, but which is, in its rela- 
tion to the complete unfolding of 
the man by means of culture, more 
vital and important than any of these 
special knowledges. For the nat- 
uralist, the scientist, and the technical 
artist are men before they gain or 
use powerfully any kind of skill ; 



Personal Intimacy. 

and the enrichment and development 
of the personality is the matter of 
supreme moment with each individ- 
ual. Every kind of knowledge feeds 
the mind, and the rivulets which 
contribute to the volume of the 
stream have their great and positive 
value; but the source of the stream 
is the spring that rises among the 
hills, out of the very heart of Nature. 
There is a fundamental personal re- 
lation between men and Nature which 
is a thing apart from special and 
technical relations ; and it is through 
this relation that man appropriates 
the material and the impulse which 
Nature offers for his culture. Art 
in all its forms is powerless to give 
this peculiar knowledge and inspira- 
tion, and it is not to be had from 
men ; it is the special and distinctive 
contribution of Nature to individual 
119 



Personal Intimacy. 

culture. No knowledge of phe- 
nomena, force, law, or beauty — the 
various aspects through which Na- 
ture reveals herself — comes amiss ; 
but there is a knowledge which is 
apart from these, and which a man 
may acquire who is neither naturalist, 
scientist, nor artist ; a knowledge at 
once more intangible and elusive, and 
at the same time more vital, compre- 
hensive, and fruitful in the personal 
development. 

In association with a man of great 
gifts and acquirements the richest 
gains we make are not specific addi- 
tions to our information, but breadth 
of view, depth of insight, clearness 
of vision, re-enforcement of all that is 
most aspiring in us. It is the vital, 
not the intellectual contact that exerts 
the most enduring influence ; it is 
the general force of the man, not his 



Personal Intimacy. 

specific skill, that leaves the deepest 
impress on us. In like manner, in 
our intercourse with Nature, there is 
something which flows from the 
totality of her being which counts 
for more in our culture than any 
revelation through phenomena, force, 
law, or beauty ; something which 
enters into us rather than adds to 
our information, and which becomes 
part of us. Thoreau had a know- 
ledge of Nature in her obvious ap- 
pearances and activities to which his 
friend and neighbor could lay no 
claim ; but it detracts not a whit 
from Thoreau's achievements to say 
that Emerson learned more from 
Nature than he, and stood in more 
intimate and vital relationship with 
her. For while the naturalist studied 
the world about him with senses of 
marvellous acuteness, the poet and 

121 



Personal Intimacy. 

thinker so allied himself with that 
world that it fed the very springs of 
his being, and gave him constant 
suggestion with regard to the sanest 
and most fruitful methods of living 
his life and attaining the truest self- 
culture. 

There is nothing esoteric about this 
fundamental intimacy with Nature ; 
on the contrary, the very simplicity 
of the relation makes it difficult of 
explanation. It is an elementary 
thing, and cannot, therefore, be re- 
solved into simpler elements. It is 
as simple as the intercourse of a 
child with its mother ; and, like that 
relationship, it is mysterious, sacred, 
inaccessible to all save those who 
approach it in the right spirit. Like 
every other deep relationship, it de- 
pends somewhat on aptitude, but 
much more on securing the right con- 



Personal Intimacy. 

ditions and waiting patiently on 
growth. It is easy to give the direc- 
tions for acquiring a specific skill 
because a series of definite acts is 
involved ; it is extremely difficult 
to suggest the method of developing 
a friendship into an intimacy because 
the stages of its growth are invisible 
and the means are spiritual. There 
are, however, habits and qualities 
which are characteristic of those who 
succeed in establishing this relation- 
ship with Nature. 

They are, in the first place, very 
constantly in the presence and com- 
pany of Nature. They not only 
seize, they make opportunities for 
getting into the woods, for loitering 
in the fields, for exploring the 
streams, for walking across the coun- 
try. They seek the most secluded 
places ; they devote hours and days 
123 



Personal Intimacy. 

to quiet meditation or observation 
as far as possible from the noise of 
men. Whenever they are out of 
doors they are aware of Nature; 
they make it a rule, at first, to take 
note of the sky and the landscape, of 
the changes of the seasons in their 
most elusive registry on leaf and 
grass, and presently they see all 
these things without any conscious- 
ness of meaning to see them. They 
constantly emphasize the world about 
them by constantly seeing it and 
meditating upon it ; and so it comes 
to pass with them that the beautiful 
order of seasons, stars, flowers, and 
verdure which surrounds us, and 
which most of us barely notice, be- 
comes a constant companionship in 
their most secret thoughts and in 
their daily occupations. 

These persons form the habit, in 
124 



Personal Intimacy. 

the second place, of leaving their 
cares, work, interests, and self-con- 
sciousness behind them when they 
go out under the clear sky, along the 
country road, or into the deep woods. 
They go with an open mind ; they 
are alert to observe, but they are 
above all things else ready to receive 
whatever truth, power, or spirit Na- 
ture has to impart. They are in the 
mood to put themselves in the deep- 
est harmony with the world about 
them ; to enter into its vast move- 
ment, and to partake of its measure- 
less life. In such a mood much 
comes to a man from which he is 
otherwise cut off. For deeper in- 
fluences are borne in upon us and 
become incorporate in us when we 
keep silent than when we speak and 
act; impulses, emotions, and passions 
arise within us when we are with our 

125 



Personal Intimacy. 

fellows, but the truths that carry 
conviction and work substantial 
changes in us become clear to us in 
solitude. There is no unreality 
about all this, although in the formal 
stateme^it it seems elusive and shad- 
owy. The man who goes into the 
woods, and by self-forgetful ness be- 
comes a part of the woods, is aware 
not onlvof a freshening of his nature 
and a deepening of his thought, but 
also of a revelation of knowledge 
through closer fellowship with the 
order and beauty which enfold him. 
There enters into his mind, in such 
moods, something more enduring 
than the scene about him ; something 
to which a poet will give expression 
in verses which are not only touched 
with a beauty beyond that of words, 
but in which that beauty becomes 
the symbol of truth. The man who 
126 



Personal Intimacy. 

lacks the gift of expression will not 
write the verse, but he will see the 
beauty and be enriched by the truth. 
The experience of the coming of the 
landscape unawares into the mind 
finds expression in one of Words- 
worth's most characteristic passages : 

" There was a Boy ; ye knew him well, ye 

Cliffs 
And islands of Winander ! — many a time. 
At evening, when the earliest stars began 
To move along the edges of the hills. 
Rising or setting, would he stand alone. 
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake ; 
And then, with fingers interwoven, both hands 
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth 
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument. 
Blew mimic bootings to the silent owls. 
That they might answer him. — And they 

would shout 
Across the watery vale, and shout again. 
Responsive to his call, — with quivering peals. 
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes 

wild 

127 



Personal Intimacy. 

Of mirth and jocund din ! And, when it 

chanced 
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill. 
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he 

hung 
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 
Has carried far into his heart the voice 
Of mountain torrents ; or the visible scene 
Would enter unawares into his mind. 
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks. 
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received 
Into the bosom of the steady lake." 

The same experience is set forth still 
more strikingly in lines which seem 
to have been spoken by Nature her- 
self, so beautifully unaffected and 
direct are they : — 

"I wandered lonely as a cloud 

That floats on high o'er vales and hills. 
When all at once I saw a crowd, 
A host of golden daffodils ; 
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees. 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 
128 



Personal Intimacy. 

** Continuous as the stars that shine 
And twinkle on the milky way. 
They stretched in never-ending line 
Along the margin of a bay : 
Ten thousand saw I at a glance. 
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. 

*' The waves beside them danced, but they 
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee : — 
A poet could not but be gay 
In such a jocund company ; 
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought 
What wealth to me the show had brought : 

" For oft, when on my couch I lie 
In vacant or in pensive mood. 
They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude. 
And then my heart with pleasure fills. 
And dances with the daffodils." 

And we must turn to the same 
poet for the expression of the deeper 
experience which waits on the open 
mind in closest companionship with 
Nature; the coming into the mind 
9 129 



Personal Intimacy. 

unawares not only of beauty but 
of truth, the discernment of the in- 
visible order behind the visible, of 
the spiritual beyond the material : 

*'.... that blessed mood. 
In which the burthen of the mystery. 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world 
Is lightened : that serene and blessed mood. 
In which the affections gently lead us on, — 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul : 
While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy. 
We see into the life of things." 



130 



Chapter XIII. 

The Fundamental Correspondences. 

* I ^HIS appropriation of Nature 
"*' through forgetfulness of self 
and activity of the imagination is a 
matter of growth. It cannot be ac- 
complished in a day or in a year. 
The habits of observation and open- 
mindedness must become so fixed 
that they are part of ourselves before 
we become unconscious of them and 
conscious only of Nature. Many a 
man is so beset by his habitual in- 
terests and thoughts that silence and 
solitude serve mainly to throw his 
own personality into more distinct 
relief, and to emphasize the things 
from which he would escape. To 
131 



The Fundamental Correspondences. 

such a mood Nature can make no 
disclosure of herself, because ishe is 
shut out of sight and mind. But if 
the man persists in the'struggle to 
free himself from himself, the dissev- 
erance will be slowly accomplished, 
and the time comes at last when 
Nature is born again in the soul as a 
new resource. Companionship and 
open-mindedness steadily persisted 
in will break down all barriers of 
self-consciousness, and the relation 
begun in the merest acquaintance will 
ripen into the most fruitful intimacy. 
The myth-makers read Nature as 
a great parable of life ; in imputing 
will, reason, and feeling to inanimate 
things they interpreted and pictured 
the world about them in terms of 
their own experience. Nature be- 
came an external realization of them- 
selves. In like spirit, although by 
132 



The Fundamental Correspondences. 

a very different method, the man who 
would get from Nature all that she 
offers for his personal culture must 
re-establish theprimitive unity of con- 
sciousness, and must discern in the 
force, the order, and the movement 
about him infinite suggestion, hint, 
and guidance for his own develop- 
ment. He must regard Nature as a 
part of his own deepest life ; a sub- 
lime exposition and illustration of 
the methods of his own soul in its 
victorious endeavor to realize itself 
through its activity. For to accept 
Nature as a teacher, one must not 
only receive the definite knowledge 
she has to offer, but must receive 
also the vital influence which flows 
from her as from a great fountain of 
vitality. He who finds his true rela- 
tion to the world about him, is in the 
way to be nourished, enlightened, and 
^33 



The Fundamental Correspondences. 

unfolded by every contact with that 
world ; and in no way more effectively 
than by carefully studying and adopt- 
ing, as the spirit and method of his 
own development, the spirit and 
method of Nature. The man who 
holds this attitude will not only get for 
himself all that Nature has to impart 
of specific knowledge, but he will be 
in the way of that mysterious refresh- 
ment which comes to those who can 
forget themselves in the woods or 
fields, and also of those deep and 
thrilling disclosures of truth which 
are sometimes given to the open 
mind and the active imagination. 

Emerson more than once empha- 
sizes the fact that man is an analo- 
gist ; he declares that " all thinking 
is analogizing," and that our con- 
stant occupation is to study the re- 
lations of things. "No one can 
134 



The Fundamental Correspondences. 

doubt," says Miss Blow in "Sym- 
bolic Education," "that analogy is 
the key to the process of primitive 
man. To its influence must be as- 
cribed the universal belief of sav- 
ages in the animation of all natural 
objects. Interpreting the world 
around them through the medium 
of their own sensations, they endow 
all objects with life, feeling, volition. 
In their conception, sun and moon, 
clouds and winds, sea and mountains 
are animate beings, whose lives may 
be interpreted by human analogies." 
That the results of this early anal- 
ogizing are misleading and inaccurate 
as interpretations and explanations of 
natural processes and phenomena, 
does not impair the service of this 
universal instinct nor weaken its 
authority as a method of discovery. 
Men everywhere and in all stages of 
135 



The Fundamental Correspondences. 

culture analogize because the universe 
is compact with correspondences, 
and knit together, part with part, 
in inseverable relations ; one fact 
sheds light on another, and law brings 
out law, the world over. Every 
place at which a man stands is a 
point from which the whole order of 
things may be discerned, because he 
himself is part of that order and all 
its lines run through him. The 
myth-makers — the children of the 
race rather than its fathers — were 
mistaken in imputing to Nature fac- 
ulties and feelings like their own ; 
but under the fanciful play of their 
thought they discerned the great 
truth of the unity, and, therefore, 
of the deep and vital relationships, of 
all things. They were more accurate 
in their dreams, so far as this fun- 
damental conception is concerned, 
136 



The Fundamental Correspondences. 

than those who hold Nature to be a 
purely material creation, having no 
spiritual significance for men. 

These correspondences, which per- 
vade all life, make the universe com- 
prehensible, and give it that sublime 
beauty which shines through it when 
we discern its spiritual symbolism. 
We explain ourselves by Nature, and 
we comprehend Nature through our 
knowledge of ourselves. Light 
flashes from fact to fact, from law 
to law. We discover not only that 
one aspect of the world involves a 
corresponding faculty in ourselves, 
or vice versa, but that truth along 
one line is truth along all lines ; so 
that a reconstruction of our notions 
of geology, biology, or psychology 
involves a reconstruction of our 
notions of theology. We find our 
history and destiny bound up with 
137 



The Fundamental Correspondences. 

every science, because we are in vital 
relationship with the whole order of 
things at every stage of its mysteri- 
ous progression. The most remote 
event in geology, the earliest devel- 
opment in biology, affect us in ways 
past our knov/ledge ; for in whatever 
direction we search, we find corre- 
spondence, analogy, and relationship 
between ourselves and the things 
about us. The dreams of youth 
often have a prophetic element in 
them ; and those marvellous dreams 
of primitive men which we call 
mythology had in them a vision 
of a truth deeper and more com- 
prehensive than any purely material- 
istic interpretation or explanation of 
natural fact or process. 

This discovery of correspondences 
and relationships bears its fruit in 
science, poetry, philosophy, and those 
138 



The Fundamental Correspondences. 

upper reaches of thought which ally 
man to God ; but it is also the 
process by which each individual in- 
terprets Nature to himself and ap- 
propriates the material and method 
she offers for his own culture. Com- 
panionship and open-mindedness find 
their supreme rewards in this dis- 
covery and appropriation. For the 
man v/ho persists in keeping in the 
society of Nature and opening him- 
self to her influences becomes more 
and more skilled in perceiving corre- 
spondences and analogies between 
the processes of Nature and the pro- 
cesses of his own growth ; he discerns 
with increasing distinctness the con- 
crete parable of his life constantly be- 
fore him. And he brings the methods 
of his own unfolding more and more 
into harmony with the methods of 
Nature ; for he finds in their marvel- 
139 



The Fundamental Correspondences. 

lous order something deeper, more 
vital, and more fruitful than aca- 
demic method or device ; he dis- 
covers the laws and the procedure 
of life itself. 



140 



Chapter XIV. 

The Creative Force. 

'npHE analogy between the pro- 
cesses and aspects of Nature 
and the method and order of our 
human hfe becomes clear to a man 
in the degree in which he feels his 
vital relationship with Nature and 
realizes, through observation, imagi- 
nation, and meditation, the depth 
and splendor of the movement about 
him. We are no sooner involved in 
consciousness with the order of things 
than we begin to feel the measureless 
and inexhaustible vitaHty which fills 
that order to its very last manifesta- 
tion. Whichever way we turn we 
141 



The Creative Force. 

are confronted with a flooding life 
which clothes the world as with a 
garment, constantly fading and fray- 
ing, but constantly re-woven on invisi- 
ble and inaudible looms. ' Sometimes 
the wave recedes, but it always re- 
turns ; and even in its ebb we have 
learned to find the definite and inevi- 
table promise of its flood. Winter is 
concealment, not absence of life, and 
the woods are as full of potential 
vitality when the snow covers them 
as vv^hen the summer sun strives in 
vain to penetrate the depths of their 
foliage. Life climbs from the low- 
est depth of animal to the highest 
altitude of human existence ; from 
the invisible organism in an invisible 
portion of water to the most massive 
tree. It flows like a torrent through 
Nature ; and the visible universe, 
seen with the eye of science, is but 

14.2 



The Creative Force. 

the product of a mysterious and im- 
measurable stream of force which is 
so aUied with vitahty that among all 
animate things it is identical with it. 
And the story of the earth, told by 
the different sciences, is the story of 
the successive stages by which life 
has advanced from form to form, 
from the lowest to the highest. We 
are enfolded in a vast process, in 
which life is supreme, and which 
exists in order that the purpose of 
life, the design involved in it, may be 
wrought out. Forms change, every 
visible thing is subject to modifica- 
tion, decay, and final dissolution; 
but life passes victoriously on from 
form to form, and it is only when it 
retires from the form it once filled 
out and sustained that the process 
of upbuilding yields to the process 
of disintegration. 

T43 



The Creative Force. 

It is in this mysterious force which 
we call life, and in the movement 
through which it manifests itself, 
that we find the secret and source 
of power. This is the sublime en- 
ergy in which all achievement rests ; 
for this is the elementary, original, 
creative force ; the force that makes, 
sustains, and preserves. There is 
nothing else which creates or con- 
serves ; nothing else which has the 
gift of immortality ; for it is life alone 
which lives. In the individual career, 
as in the vast career of Nature, it is 
this mysterious force which vitalizes 
and is the conduit of the creative 
power ; and in the degree in which 
a man shares this mysterious force is 
he original, creative, fecund. Not in 
skill, device, system, artifice, or mech- 
anism is originative impulse to be 
found, but in life ; in this inexplica- 
144 



The Creative Force. 

ble force with which some men are 
charged to such a degree that they 
become fountains of vitahty : they 
influence, inspire, dominate their age, 
their contemporaries, and posterity. 
The most obvious characteristic of 
men of action — of Alexander, Cae- 
sar, Napoleon — is a kind of super- 
human vitality ; they stand for energy 
incarnate ; they cannot rest ; so long 
as they act under the conditions 
which are imposed upon all men, they 
are invincible. Everything gives way 
before them, and institutions change 
at their will because they bring life 
in new forms. They are, to recall 
Balzac's phrase, " torrents of will ; " 
rushing streams of life, which make 
new channels in human history and 
organization. 

In like manner the great artists are 
possessed by a kindred energy of life ; 

10 145 



The Creative Force. 

they are insatiable in their hunger for 
experience ; they are driven at times 
by a fury of passion to know, to feel, 
and to express all that ^ lies within 
the reach of a man's soul. Some- 
times, as in the case of Marlowe, 
they recognize no limits to their 
power, either of appropriation or 
of expression, but rush on to com- 
pass the impossible. Homer, Dante, 
Shakspeare, and Goethe ; Phidias, 
Michael Angelo, Rembrandt ; Bee- 
thoven, Schumann, Wagner, — the 
representative men of the creative 
order in the field of art ; — shared in 
this prodigious endowment of vitality. 
They lived as if man had never lived 
before, as if they were the first pos- 
sessors of this marvellous power, the 
earliest explorers of this great mys- 
tery. They saw the world with eyes 
in which the primeval surprise and 
146 



The Creative Force. 

wonder still lingered ; they saw the 
earth, the heavens, men, and women, 
and the movement and order of their 
being, as if these were visible for the 
first time. They felt all experience, 
through their own living or through 
knowledge, sympathy, and imagina- 
tion, as if experience were something 
new and unheard of before. And 
what they saw and felt they expressed 
with the clearness, the vivacity, the 
insight, the beauty, and the power 
which belong to the first vision, the 
first emotion, and the first utterance. 
They had various gifts, they worked 
in ways widely dissimilar, and they 
used different materials ; but the qual- 
ity which they possessed in common, 
and which, beyond all their gifts, apti- 
tudes, and skills, characterizes and 
explains them, is their measureless 
vitality. They were alive in every 
147 



The Creative Force. 

sense ; they felt with the unspent 
freshness of youth ; they spoke with 
the authority, the consciousness of 
veracity, the indifference -to denial of 
discoverers. 

And that which interested them 
most deeply and which they con- 
stantly strove to formulate and ex- 
press was the manifestation, the 
working out, the play of this mysteri- 
ous force which flowed through them 
and about them. They were con- 
cerned primarily with life itself in all 
its forms, and not with abstractions. 
They saw habit, manner, occupation, 
dress, equipage, social order. Church, 
and State not as fixed and final things, 
existing apart from men in an abstract 
order, but as the outgrowth of human 
feeling, acting, and living ; and, there- 
fore, as endlessly significant of man's 
mysterious life. It was due to no 
148 



The Creative Force. 

accident that the Homeric poems are 
so saturated with the hfe of the early- 
Greeks ; behind customs, manners, 
orders, and rehgion the makers of the 
epics felt that life so deeply and were 
so charged with it that they could 
not tell a story without imparting it. 
It was the reality behind the forms 
and institutions with which they were 
dealing, and it was the reality in them- 
selves. In his wanderings Dante 
brooded ceaselessly over this myste- 
rious force which works itself out in 
ways so holy or so unrighteous ; the 
current of which is so deep and irre- 
sistible that it cannot be confined in 
the channels of time and space, but 
flows on into the shoreless seas be- 
yond. And Shakspeare apparently 
saw nothing else ; for from his earliest 
to his latest play his eye searches the 
experience of men as if set to see all 
149 



The Creative Force. 

that is in Hfe and to force from it a 
disclosure of its secret by patiently 
showing, in drama after drama, how 
it is wrought out in human destiny. 
These original, creative natures are 
not only compact of life, but they 
are absorbed by it. It is not only 
their distinctive quality and gift, 
but it is also their peculiar problem. 
They are like the forces of Nature 
in their dependence on the vital 
energy ; but, unlike Nature, they are 
able in part to analyze, comprehend, 
and illustrate or represent the myste- 
rious power which is in them. 



ISO 



Chapter XV. 

The Great Revelation. 

'HAT is there in this quality 
which we call life that gives 
it such potency and significance ? 
Why do we say of a piece of art, 
when it strikes home to our imagina- 
tions, " That is true to life " ? Why 
do we feel a sudden thrill when out 
of novel, poem, oration, or play there 
leaps one of those lines which by 
their self-revealing authority and 
beauty give us the assurance of their 
truth to life ? Nothing seems more 
vague and difficult to grasp than the 
vital element in Nature, in humanity, 
and in art ; why is it, then, the source 
of all that endures, the end and cul- 
151 



The Great Revelation. 

mination of all forms of expression ? 
The more we study the mystery 
the more mysterious does it be- 
come ; but only because all elemen- 
tary and vital processes are wrapped 
in mystery. No one knows what it 
is which gives the flower its form of 
beauty, its breath of fragrance, its 
fresh and dewy charm ; but this force, 
whatever it is, is the reality in the 
flower, and mocks all human skill to 
reproduce or imitate it. After it has 
withdrawn from a human form, every- 
thing that the eye saw remains, but 
the form no longer means anything. 
Perfect as it is, it is an empty shell. 
The life has gone out of it, and it is 
nothing. 

This mysterious quality is so po- 
tent and precious because it is the 
elementary principle ; the inexplic- 
able, unresolvable, divine element in 
152 



The Great Revelation. 

this mass of matter, which separates 
death from life, which makes con- 
sciousness possible, and which brings 
in its invisible current all possibilities 
of knowledge, feeling, thought, and 
action. It gives matter its only signi- 
ficance, and imparts to visible things 
of all kinds their only value. So 
precious is it that it matters little 
what form of manifestation it takes 
on. When a living phrase sounds 
in our ears we are equally spell- 
bound, whether it comes out of the 
life of the hero, with the light of his 
great deed on him, or out of the life 
of the peasant almost invisible in his 
obscurity. The thing that comes 
home to us everywhere is not con- 
dition or circumstance ; it is life. 
So long as the artist penetrates to the 
life and reveals it, we are indifferent 
as to the person portrayed or de- 
153 



The Great Revelation. 

scribed. Life alone has a fixed value 
in art ; all other qualities are vari- 
able. When we get beneath the sur- 
face and touch this hidden force, v/e 
feel that we are face to face with the 
primal mystery ; we are in contact 
with God. For this is the force 
which permeates Nature and gives 
her forms their meaning and their 
beauty ; and this also is the force 
which lifts humanity out of the dust 
and gives it its dignity and oppor- 
tunity. It eludes us ; but it is always 
the supreme thing in and to us. 

Beyond this elementary value life 
has another incalculable interest for 
us : it is not only the divine ele- 
ment in us, but in its working out 
it reveals itself. There is a great 
thought or order behind Nature 
which is being wrought out century 
after century in all forms, phenom- 
154 



The Great Revelation. 

ena, forces, and processes ; and the 
supreme interest of the universe for 
man lies in the discovery of this 
thought or purpose. That thought 
is being gradually disclosed to the 
observation and study of men, and as 
it slowly dawns on the human mind 
there comes with it the conscious- 
ness that man is reading the thought 
of God, that the human mind is 
coming into contact with the divine 
mind. So every bit of Nature, 
stone, fish, bird, or leaf becomes 
precious ; they are all parts of a 
whole ; they are links in a chain. 
Seen in the light of this sublime dis- 
covery all matter is penetrated with 
thought. In like manner, through 
human life in all its forms, under all 
its conditions, in all stages of its un- 
folding, a great thought or order is be- 
ing wrought out. Sometimes men are 



The Great Revelation. 

conscious of this order and co-operate 
with it ; sometimes they are ignorant 
of it and oppose it ; but whether 
co-operating or antagonizing, they are 
always bringing it into clearer light. 
The law is revealed as distinctly in 
the punishment it inflicts on those 
who violate it as in the obedience it 
secures from those who respect it. 
Good or evil, high or low, illustrious 
or obscure, all human lives disclose 
something above and beyond them, 
and the process of history is a pro- 
cess of revelation. Men are contin- 
ually, under all conditions, revealing 
what is in them, and that revelation 
carries with it a disclosure of the 
thought or order which explains their 
natures and hints at their destiny. 

Looking at races in the perspective 
of history, we see clearly, amid much 
that is uncertain and obscure, that 
156 



The Great Revelation. 

each race has wrought out some idea 
in a way peculiar to itself; for what 
we call the genius of a race is its 
spirit or way of looking at and using 
its opportunities. Amid all the 
confusing currents and movements 
of Greek life we discern clearly 
enough two or three racial character- 
istics ; two or three great ideas 
brought out with unmistakable clear- 
ness and illustrated in a wide range 
of arts and achievements. The 
Greek race stands for a revelation as 
well as for a history ; it made several 
things clear to the world. It was 
only imperfectly conscious that it was 
bringing these ideas to the light, for 
in its best estate it was much more 
occupied with living than with spec- 
ulating. It was absorbed in living 
according to its nature, and in the 
act of living — that is, of working 
157 



The Great Revelation. 

out its nature — it made great addi- 
tions to humanity's knowledge of 
itself, its life, and its destiny. The 
same statement may be 'made with 
reference to every race, ancient and 
modern ; and not only with reference 
to every race, but to every individual. 
The great figures of art owe their in- 
terest to the fact that they reveal 
something; they disclose their own 
natures, and therefore they throw 
light upon life itself We study 
Hamlet and Faust endlessly, because 
beyond the personal interest they 
awaken, they lift great tracts of life 
out of the primal darkness into 
light. 

There is, therefore, in every bit of 
life, noble or ignoble, beautiful or 
repulsive, great or small, traces of 
a thought, evidences of an order, 
lines of design. Every bit of life is 
158 



The Great Revelation. 

a bit of revelation ; it brings us face 
to face with the great mystery and 
the great secret. In every such dis- 
closure we are not only looking at 
ourselves, but we are catching a 
glimpse of God. All revelation of 
life has the spell, therefore, of a dis- 
covery. We hold our breath when 
we hear a great line on the stage for 
the first time, or come upon it in 
a book, because we are discovering 
something ; we are awed and hushed 
because we are looking into the 
mystery. There is the thrill, the 
wonder, the joy of seeing another 
link in the invisible chain which 
binds us to the past and unites us to 
the future. All human experience, 
action, and expression is permeated 
with thought ; not with the thought 
of the individual alone, but with the 
thought which he incarnates and 
159 



The Great Revelation. 

works out. So every touch of life 
in art — even the slightest fragment 
— is precious to us. There is some- 
thing of ourselves in it, and there is 
something of God. 



1 60 



Chapter XVI. 

Form and Vitality. 

'T~^HE deep and all-embracing cur- 
-^ rent of life with which Nature 
surrounds us, and which constantly 
presses- upon our consciousness as 
something divinely great and signifi- 
cant, begets in us, by the irresistible 
force of analogy, a new and deepen- 
ing sense of life as the source of 
knowledge, impulse, and enrichment. 
Whether we look at Nature or at 
art, we are constantly reminded that 
the form is secondary to, and depend- 
ent upon, vitality ; that life is every- 
where and always first, and that skill, 
method, contrivance, are always and 
II i6i 



Form and Vitality. 

everywhere subordinate. The evi- 
dence of true culture is a deepened 
and enlarged life, not a broadened 
knowledge ; and he wholly misses the 
secret of culture who does not see 
that it is an inward growth and that 
its completeness depends on vitality. 
If it be true, as has been said, that 
the act of living is a revelation not 
only of what is in the man, but of 
that which is being wrought out 
through him, then every man who 
seeks to get out of life all that it has 
to give, ought to seek, not to shun, 
its experiences. Browning has set 
forth in many ways, with all the 
insight ' and' force of his genius, the 
great truth that experience is to be 
sought, not to be shunned ; for he 
who avoids experience avoids also 
that development of himself in which 
alone we really live. In such a career 
162 



Form and Vitality, 

the animal life within us, being com- 
fortably housed, fed, and clothed, may 
go on without incident, emotion, or 
change ; but there is a complete arrest 
of the life of the soul. The body 
lives, but the man dies. For the man 
lives in the exact degree in which he 
shares in the universal process of liv- 
ing by giving freest play to thought, 
emotion, impulse, and activity. 

The man in whom culture bears 
its ripest fruit is not often a man of 
action, but he is always a man in 
whom the deepest impulse is vital 
rather than intellectual, and whose 
supreme interest is in life itself. It 
is surprising to discover, when one 
goes over the list of the masters of 
the arts, how true this is of them ; 
how supreme is their vital interest, 
and how subordinate their intellectual 
interest in persons, events, and ideas. 
163 



Form and Vitality. 

To say of a work of art that it is 
above all things intellectual, is to 
assign it a secondary place ; for a 
great work of art must issue from a 
deeper source than the intellect ; it 
must issue out of life itself. In every 
such work the intellectual quality is 
necessarily high, but it is subordinate ; 
the springs of power are elsewhere. 
The man of culture need not, and as 
a rule cannot, share in the engrossing 
activities of his time ; vitality is not 
necessarily evidenced by action ; it is 
evidenced by the things which evoke 
the deepest interest and call out the 
fullest sympathy. Shakspeare was 
only in a very limited way a man of 
action ; but he has portrayed and 
interpreted action with unrivalled in- 
sight and power, because his interest 
was in human life, and action is the 
ultimate form of expression of that 
164 



Form and Vitality. 

life. Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, 
Amiel, Renan, Lowell, were all repre- 
sentative men of culture ; men, that 
is, of a peculiar ripeness of nature and 
a peculiar command of beauty of ex- 
pression. There is an impression 
among many people that they were 
men a little removed from their 
fellows and concerned chiefly with 
the things of the mind. The things 
of the mind had, it is true, very great 
charm for them ; but the deepest 
interest of each of this notable group 
was vital, not intellectual ; it was an 
interest in men as men, not as minds. 
" Marius the Epicurean " is one of 
the text-books of culture, so full is 
it of that ripe and mellow tone which 
only the man of culture commands ; 
but it is, above all things, the record 
of a life, not of a mind ; the register 
of a growth by contact with life in a 
i6s 



Form and Vitality. 

long and varied series of experiences. 
Amiel's " Journal " is another of the 
text-books of culture ; but it is, first 
and foremost, the story of a human 
soul. And as for Matthew Arnold, 
his interest in the human problem is 
so supreme and pressing that he can- 
not resist the problems of the hour, 
but must have his say about the reli- 
gious question, the Irish question. 
Disestablishment, and the marrying 
of deceased wives' sisters ! 

In the process of culture, that which 
is deepest and richest is this deepen- 
ing and widening interest in the life 
of Nature and of men ; this percep- 
tion that in these kindred but sev- 
ered streams of vitality the potency 
of all growth and art is to be found. 
The man who is trying to make the 
most of life and its opportunities 
continually comes into closer contact 
i60 



Form and Vitality. 

with the vital stream because he finds 
that wherever it touches him it en- 
riches him. He discovers that every 
person he meets, whether exalted in 
station or obscure, has something to 
impart to him. One of the most 
eloquent and influential men of the 
century in this country made It a 
practice to learn the secrets of every 
man's skill and experience, so far as 
these were properly communicable. 
From the pilot, the engineer, the 
miner, the farmer, the artist, he drew 
whatever was most significant in their 
history and occupation ; and so he 
went through life, enriching himself 
with those accumulations of knowl- 
edge which, although in private hands, 
form the capital of the race. He was 
only in a subordinate degree a student; 
but he became a man of culture be- 
cause he deliberately drew from other 
167 



Form and Vitality. 

human lives what they had learned. 
Nothing is more significant of the 
universality of the process of revela- 
tion through human life than the fact 
that whenever a great writer describes 
the most commonplace persons, in 
the light of this revelation, these 
persons at once become absorbingly 
interesting. When George Ehot or 
Thomas Hardy studies them, the vil- 
lage folk, to their oldest neighbors so 
uninteresting, become at once comic, 
pathetic, or tragic. The laws of life 
are being worked out through them, 
character is being formed, and the 
great story of man, beside which all 
other narratives are dull and colorless, 
is written in their occupations, traits, 
habits, and experience. Every bit 
of human life is significant and pre- 
cious ; that is the first lesson which 
the man who desires to bear in him- 



Form and Vitality. 

self the ripest fruits of culture must 
learn. 

This vital disclosure of truth is 
conveyed to us not only in all 
persons, but in all relations, happen- 
ings, and activities. In every aspect 
of life there is the revelation of a law 
or a principle, and all life becomes 
educative and contributes to our 
enrichment when we act upon this 
hint. The re-discovery of the sanc- 
tity of the primary and universal 
relations of men in the family, the 
State, and the Church is one of the 
great achievements of this century, 
and it is no exaggeration to say that 
we have not as yet begun to com- 
prehend what these relations and in- 
stitutions mean in their educational 
influence upon us ; in the light they 
throw, either directly or by analogy, 
on the deepest human problems ; 
169 



Form and Vitality. 

and in the immense deepening of 
impulse and experience which they 
effect in humanity at large. When 
we have taken the attitude of teacha- 
bleness, all things teach us, and life 
sweeps past us, not to devastate but 
to enrich us ; all experience ripens us, 
as the Nile turns Egypt from barren- 
ness to bloom. And when we turn 
to art we find ourselves searching 
more and more eagerly for the life 
behind the form ; for we realize that 
the form is the fruit of the life. We 
cannot comprehend Job, Isaiah, and 
Paul until we have learned the 
Hebrew temperament and thought ; 
we are shut out of the innermost 
beauty of Greek art in sculpture, 
building, poetry, and oratory, until 
we have, discerned the genius of the 
Greek race. All these great artists 
and all these great arts lead us back 
170 



Form and Vitality. 

to the vital force whose exponents 
and achievements they were. For in 
the world of men, as in that of Nature, 
it is that force which creates, fertilizes, 
and sustains ; and we are able to make 
the most of ourselves only as we keep 
in its current. 



171 



Chapter XVII. 

The Method. 

'TpHE deepest and most Inclusive 
'^ impression which Nature con- 
veys to us is that of exhaustless 
vitality ; all other impressions are 
subordinate to this, and are, indeed, 
involved in it ; for the life within 
every natural form is that which 
gives it interest and significance. 
And next in importance to the fact 
of life comes the method of life, — 
growth. Through an endless series 
of phases the life of the physical world 
has manifested and worked itself out ; 
but in all times, so far as we know, 
in every sphere and stage, in every 
172 



The Method. 

form and condition, the method has 
been the same. Wherever hfe holds 
its own in the world, growth takes 
place ; life and growth are every- 
where bound together so closely 
that it is impossible to see the one 
without seeing the other ; for life 
appears to have no other way of 
manifesting itself. From the seed to 
the fruit in which the plant fulfils its 
nature and function, from the egg to 
the perfected animal, from the pri- 
mordial cell to the complete man, 
the process by which life evolves its 
potency and discloses its aims is the 
process of growth. No other method 
is known to Nature ; and the univer- 
sality of this method, and the com- 
pleteness with which, so far as we can 
see, life is limited to it and identified 
with it, puts it in importance on a 
level with the mysterious force to 
173 



The Method. 

which it is bound in indissoluble 
union. So completely are life and 
growth involved in each other that 
we cannot conceive of> either apart 
from the other ; they are as thoroughly 
blended together as thought and style 
in the highest order of writing. 

Growth is a vital as distinguished 
from a mechanical process ; it par- 
takes, therefore, of the mystery which 
envelops the essence of life wher- 
ever it appears ; it is inexplicable and 
unresolvable. It cannot be under- 
stood, and it cannot be imitated ; it 
has the perennial interest and wonder 
of the miraculous ; there is an ele- 
ment of the divine in it because it is 
God's way of working in this world. 
As we study it the impression deepens 
within us that we are face to face with 
a power not ourselves ; with a method 
which not only transcends our under- 
174 



The Method. 

standing, but from which our finest 
skill is differentiated not only in 
degree but in kind. Men have done 
wonderful things with thought, craft, 
and tools ; but the manner of the 
unfolding of a wild-flower is as great 
a mystery to-day as it was when sci- 
ence began to look, to compare, and 
to discover. We can master the con- 
struction of Westminster Abbey or 
of the Cathedral at Amiens, but the 
primrose and the aster keep their 
secret inviolate. Between the thing 
that grows, however simple in organi- 
zation, and the thing that is made, 
however complex and highly elabo- 
rated, there is a gulf set which has 
never been crossed. Mechanism is 
marvellous, but growth is miraculous ; 
and the two are set in perpetual 
contrast. 

The most obvious characteristic of 
175 



The Method. 

growth is the fact that it is an unfold- 
ing, an expansion from within, a de- 
velopment of some germinal form ; it 
proceeds not by additions from with- 
out, but by evolution from within. 
The .seed so entirely disappears in 
the process which it sets in motion 
that it would never be connected with 
the fully grown plant but for the 
reproductive function which binds 
the last stage to the first ; the acorn 
is so swallowed in the tremendous 
life which is liberated from its tiny 
shell that no one would dream of its 
relation to the oak if the tree did not 
bear again the seeds of other trees as 
vast as itself. But, despite the dis- 
parity between the seed and the plant, 
the acorn and the oak, all the possi- 
bilities of these marvellous unfoldings 
are wrapped up in the insignificant 
germs. There is nothing in the 
176 



The Method. 

massive structure of the oak which 
was not potentially in the acorn, 
nothing in the deHcate loveliness of 
the rose that was not in the bit of 
hard stuff from which it grew. There 
has been no change of nature, no 
addition of foreign substances ; there 
has been simply the complete unfold- 
ing of all the possibilities of vitality, 
magnitude, form, and beauty which 
were folded up in the germ. There 
is perhaps nothing more incredible in 
Nature than the development of the 
oak from the acorn, when one takes 
into account the almost incompre- 
hensible disparity of size between 
the two and the force put forth in 
lifting so vast a mass to such a height 
in the air, and anchoring it so firmly 
in the ground that the rage of the 
elements leaves it unscathed. Before 
such a mystery of vital expansion 

12 177 



The Method. 

science stands silent ; for the result 
has been achieved so silently, with 
such ease, with such absence of 
tools and implements, witji such con- 
tinuity of action, that the tree, like a 
great work of art, gives no hint of 
the process by which it was made. 
It was not made, it grew ; and that 
is all we can say about it. 

The perfection to which it finally 
comes in type, form, and color is 
conditioned on the completeness with 
which the potentialities of the original 
germ are developed. Nature makes 
distinct and highly organized types ; 
she does not make incongruous 
aggregations of unrelated materials. 
She does not artificially bring to- 
gether materials which have no deep 
affinity ; she starts from a living germ, 
and that germ takes to itself the sub- 
stances which are vitally related to 
178 



The Method. 

It, and rejects all other substances. 
It does not enlarge itself by addition, 
but by expansion ; and the result is 
not a mechanical combination, but a 
new and independent creation, sym- 
metrical, harmonious, and complete. 
Through a thousand forms, in the 
greatest apparent confusion and com- 
plexity of condition. Nature uner- 
ringly perfects her types; a host of 
living things grow together out of the 
same soil, in the same atmosphere, 
under the same sky ; but these living 
things never lose their individuality. 
On the contrary, they intensify and 
clarify it. 

This type is determined by the 
germ; but the germ reaches out and 
fulfils its potentialities of growth and 
life only as it is nourished and en- 
riched by the elements which sur- 
round it. The process involves two 
179 



The Method. 

great factors : a vital germ at the 
centre, which has the instinct or fac- 
ulty of selection ; and soil, air, light, 
heat, and moisture, which minister to 
and make possible this unfolding. 
The seed, the blade, the fully devel- 
oped tree, shrub, or grain need nour- 
ishment, and so they take freely from 
the soil, the atmosphere, and the sky ; 
but what they take they incorporate 
into themselves. The germ expands 
a thousand-fold, taking to itself mate- 
rial from without, which, in bulk and 
weight, dwarfs it into insignificance ; 
but it is not overwhelmed and lost ; 
on the contrary it recasts the mass 
which it appropriates, masters it, 
shapes it to new ends, and subordi- 
nates it wholly to its own purposes. 
So completely does it possess itself 
of that which it takes out of the ele- 
ments that all trace of the distinctive 
i8o 



The Method. 

form and existence of these elements 
disappears. The most searching anal- 
ysis cannot separate the different sub- 
stances which have gone to the 
making of a rose ; the delicate and 
sensitive flower, whose life is a 
bloom and a breath, seems like a 
spiritualization of the particles of 
matter which have entered into it, 
a fragrant soul escaping from the 
body of earth which imprisoned it. 
In that final synthesis of growth we 
are confronted with the universal 
miracle of harmonious and independ- 
ent creation out of a mass of material 
which gave no hint either of the form 
of the final product or of its captivat- 
ing loveliness. The secret of this 
preservation of the type in such a 
vast complexity of conditions is 
found in the law under which each 
living germ selects and appropriates 
i8i 



The Method. 

those elements only which are vitally- 
related to its own structure and qual- 
ity. Each germ takes those elements 
which it can assimilate' and rejects 
all others. Surrounded by countless 
other germs, in a world which pre- 
sents the greatest variety of those 
foods which nourish plant life, each 
germ, without hesitation, uncertainty, 
or pause, unerringly takes what be- 
longs to it, and is as indifferent to all 
foreign substances as if they did not 
exist. So the type preserves its in- 
tegrity in a world full of substances 
which, but for the law which governs 
its development, would mar its indi- 
viduality and make its perfection 
impossible. 



182 



Chapter XVIII. 

Distinctness of Individuality. 

nr^HIS is also the method of men 
-*" and women of the creative order. 
The distinctive quality of original 
persons is sharp, clear, definite indi- 
viduality ; unmistakable integrity of 
type. Minds of the highest rank 
are characterized, not by immense 
acquirements, but by adequate self- 
development, and by complete ad- 
justment to the life about them ; by 
a connection with that life so vital 
and intimate that they gather it into 
themselves and become, in a free and 
noble sense, its highest products. 
183 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

The man of genius is no more sepa- 
rated from his fellows than is the 
mountain peak from the earth ; on 
the contrary, the higher the peak the 
greater the mass of earth which lifts 
it skyward. Genius involves not 
less, but more humanity in its pos- 
sessor ; it implies not separation from, 
but identification with, humanity. 
Homer stood on the shoulders of 
the Greek race; he was their debtor 
quite as much as they were his. But 
Homer did not annex to his own 
experience in any external way the 
experience of his race ; he absorbed 
that experience and made it his own. 
Moreover, he took only what was 
vitally related to himself; he was a 
Greek to the heart ; the great typical 
man of his race. If he had attempted 
to be also a Persian, an Egyptian, or 
a Phoenician, his would never have 
184 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

become the clear, resonant voice of 
all Greece, nor would his work be 
the common possession of all modern 
speech. 

That which impresses us in writing 
of the highest order is not miscella- 
neous knowledge, but flavor, raciness, 
individuality, the tang of the race 
and the soil. A secondary writer 
may have scholarship, skill, talents 
of various kinds, but his words do 
not strike home to the imagination ; 
they do not impress us as being in- 
evitable ; we are conscious that they 
might have been written in any cli- 
mate, under any sky. Burns's songs, 
on the other hand, are as unmistaka- 
bly a product of Scotch soil as the 
heather ; and Scott's greater stories are 
indissolubly welded to local tradition, 
legend, and history. To take an 
illustration nearer home, the " Scarlet 
i8s 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

Letter " could not have been written 
outside of New England. Its, roots 
are sunk deep in the deposit of cen- 
turies of Puritan thought, and feeling. 
Writers of the order of Burns, Scott, 
and Hawthorne assimilate all the ele- 
ments of the soil, the atmosphere, and 
the sky which are vitally related to 
their own natures and harmonious 
with their own genius, and perfect 
their personality by taking on the 
personality of their race. There is 
no loss of individuality in this pro- 
cess ; on the contrary, there is a vast 
enlargement and clarification of per- 
sonality. A notable and beautiful 
illustration of this clear and victori- 
ous development of a type by assimi- 
lation of what was harmonious in its 
surroundings is furnished by the 
career and character of Lincoln, who 
was not only a complete individual 
i86 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

type, but a perfect national type as 
well, — 

" New birth of our new soil. 
The first American." 

He appropriated from his country, 
his people, and his time that for 
which his nature had an affinity, and 
he became original, creative, typical, 
by self-unfolding. A man of this 
temper and methods uses books and 
technical processes, but is never their 
product. Whatever he takes of dis- 
cipline, training, or knowledge, he 
makes so completely a part of him- 
self that the processes and materials 
are entirely lost in the final product. 
His discipline and training leave no 
trace save in his self-command, his 
skill, and his effectiveness. His 
knowledge is so blended with his 
experience that he completely pos- 
187 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

sesses it, instead of being possessed 
by it as is the pedant ; and when he 
gives it out in expression, it has taken 
some new form or received some 
fresh interpretation. He uses expe- 
rience, knowledge, all the materials 
of power which surround him, not 
to efface the lines along which his 
nature craves development, but to 
emphasize them. In every form of 
expression he gives us not his ac- 
quirements but himself; and his ac- 
quirements return to us so merged in 
the final product that we cannot trace 
them. A nature which has this power 
of drawing upon all the sources of 
influence, intelligence, and vitality 
about it, becomes clairvoyant and 
typical. It attains such profound 
and unconscious harmony with the 
life in which it is enfolded and by 
which it is nourished that it speaks 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

at last out of the depths of that 
life and reveals its secrets. 

A man of this temper knows what 
is in the heart of his race. He feels 
every movement of its unconscious 
life ; he divines its thought ; and he 
becomes in the end, on a colossal 
scale, the man of his time and his 
people. He is simple, harmonious, 
individual. Such a man was Tour- 
guenieff; in certain respects the most 
marvellous race interpreter of modern 
times. An artist of subtle and splen- 
did gifts, he seemed to know intui- 
tively all the secrets of the Russian 
people; and in those compact and 
impressive stories of his, so free from 
all extraneous discussion, so concen- 
trated in spirit and action, so swift 
and deep and powerful in sentiment 
and movement, the Slavonic nature 
breathes and suffers and acts. From 
189 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

this point of view a further reference 
to Lincoln is almost inevitable. Born 
and bred on the old frontier, with 
the scantiest formal education, un- 
couth in figure, he seemed to many, 
in the critical hour when he became 
President, fatally untrained for the re- 
sponsibilities of the time and the place. 
When the news of his nomination 
was received in a certain university 
town, a teacher of high character and 
wide culture is reported to have said 
that the country would have a good 
man in the White House if only 
some better trained man could write 
his messages and speeches for him ! 
Those messages and speeches are, 
with the exception of a few lyrics, 
the only literature of the great strug- 
gle. At least three of those public 
utterances have already become clas- 
sics, not only because of their eleva- 
190 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

tion and nobility of thought and 
feeling, but because of their rare 
beauty of style. Among all the 
speakers of his time, accomplished 
orators, students of rhetoric, masters 
of the art of eloquence, Lincoln is 
the only one whose speeches are 
likely to survive. 

This superiority. It is hardly neces- 
sary to say, was neither accidental 
nor spontaneous ; like all superiority, 
it rested on a solid basis of prepara- 
tion. Lincoln was, in some respects, 
the most genuinely educated man or 
his time ; but his education was vital, 
not formal ; individual, not academic. 
There is no antagonism between 
these two kinds of education ; on 
the contrary, in the ideal training 
they must always combine and har- 
monize. There is a disposition, how- 
ever, to assume that formal education 
191 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

is the only education. From this 
point of view men like Shakspeare 
and Lincoln are inexplicable. For 
every great work of art involves ade- 
quate education ; chance is as finally 
barred out of the world of art as it is 
out of the world of nature. 

Lincoln's education becomes more 
complete the more one studies it. 
In his own way he acquired a knowl- 
edge of his people, of his time, of 
himself, and of a few books which, 
in its depth and thoroughness, made 
him the master not only of a great 
movement but of a great language. 
Men of the type of Gladstone and 
Sumner give the impression of having 
sought near and far for information 
and illustration. They impress us 
as having made large conquests in 
the field of knowledge ; but we are 
soon aware that their gain has been 
192 



Distinctness of Individuality. 

more by conquest than by incor- 
poration. They have annexed rather 
than absorbed. In the speeches of 
both these eminent men of affairs we 
hear the voice of the student rather 
than the voice of the man. Lincoln, 
on the other hand, always gives us 
a single harmonious impression of 
himself. We are always in contact 
with the man. Whatever knowledge 
he has acquired and whatever training 
he has received are tributary to the 
original force of his own personality. 
And this is true of all men of the 
creative, as contrasted with the sec- 
ondary, order ; they are never, under 
any circumstances, eclectics ; they are 
always, under all circumstances, in- 
tensely individual. They are never 
composite ; they are always strongly 
marked types. Lincoln took the ele- 
ments for which he had an affinity ; 
all others he left alone. 
13 193 



Chapter XIX. 

Vital Selection. 

"p^O age has needed to learn this 
lesson of enrichment by 
growth, by development of what is 
germinal within us, and by selection 
of what is vitally related to us in the 
world about us more than our own 
eager, restless, eclectic time, with its 
widesympathies and its tireless curios- 
ity, its tolerant temper, its measureless 
thirst for knowledge. The endeavor 
of too many men and women of this 
generation is, not to develop their own 
personality, but to absorb the knowl- 
edge of the whole world. They are 
194 



Vital Selection. 

anxious to place all religions on the 
same basis of authority, to harmo- 
nize on the instant the conclusions of 
all schools of thought, to drain all 
the sciences of their ultimate truths, 
to practise all the arts, and to gather 
about themselves the products of the 
handicrafts of the entire globe. The 
result is an immense extension of in- 
tellectual interests and activities, and 
in many cases a fatal blighting of in- 
dividuality. The note which such 
persons give forth in various forms 
of expression ceases to be clear, 
authoritative, and prophetic ; it is 
muffled, indistinct, and non-reso- 
nant. It is made up of echoes. 

It is not unusual, in these days, to 
hear men and women of intelligence 
use vocabularies made up entirely of 
generalized words ; words of such 
vast and vague implication that not 
195 



Vital Selection. 

one phrase strikes fire, not one sen- 
tence bites into the mind. Every- 
thing is misty, uncertain, indefinite. 
A fog seems to envelop the entire 
field of thought. Through this fog, 
impressive outlines sometimes loom 
portentous for the moment ; but 
they dissolve and fade into nothing- 
ness the instant we begin to feel that 
we are coming into contact with real- 
ity. There is no reality in this kind 
of intellectual activity, as there is no 
conveyance of thought, no real ex- 
pression of individual conviction or 
force in the utterances of those who 
succumb to this disintegrating 
method ; a method which destroys 
originality and makes a genuine in- 
tellectual life impossible. A vocab- 
ulary is never effective, expressive, 
and authoritative unless it is vitally 
related to the person who uses it, is 
196 



Vital Selection. 

determined by his nature and grows 
out of his experience. It is a gar- 
ment woven in the invisible chambers 
of a man's inmost life, — not a mass 
of garments gathered at random in 
Algiers, Jerusalem, Athens, and Cal- 
cutta, and worn without reference to 
variation and difference of size, color, 
or design. In language, as in all 
forms of expression, freshness, force, 
and sincerity depend on the vital 
relation between the thought and the 
word. A vocabulary of generalized 
words has no more reality of rela- 
tionship with the person who uses it 
than has the ugly idol he imports 
from India, or the Bayeux tapestry 
which he buys in Paris or London ; 
it is a manner of speech which has 
been borrowed, and which has no sig- 
nificance, therefore, as a disclosure of 
temperament and character. It im- 
197 



Vital Selection. 

plies nothing in the way of intellec- 
tual quality or habit save a retentive 
memory. The arts furnish a conclu- 
sive illustration of the law of growth 
which, in the natural world, develops 
the perfect type, and in the world of 
man the creative mind. In art defi- 
niteness of thought and sureness of 
touch are the fixed conditions of suc- 
cess ; everything turns on absolute 
clarity of vision and distinctness of 
execution. Confusion of inharmoni- 
ous ideas and vagueness of treatment 
are fatal to originality or effective- 
ness. The method of setting forth 
the highest ideals of character, of 
beauty, or of thought, is simple and 
unmistakable : it is through the per- 
fection of the type. The beauty and 
power with which the general concep- 
tion or the universal experience are set 
forth, depend on the definiteness with 
198 



Vital Selection. 

which the individual type is realized. 
A literary artist of the third class, 
who wished to express the passion 
of ambition, would brood over the 
idea and finally shape a character to 
illustrate it; and the result would be 
an inferior piece of work, in which 
the abstract idea, which properly be- 
longs to philosophy, would be pri- 
mary ; and the concrete illustration, 
which is the distinctive creation of 
art, would be secondary. On the 
other hand, when a great artist like 
Shakspeare deals with the problem, 
he creates a marvellously distinct 
personality like Macbeth, so real, so 
individual, so Instinct with life, that 
in the very perfection of his flesh and 
blood, the reality of his relation to 
the world about him, he becomes for- 
ever after an incarnation of the pas- 
sion which masters him. In the very 
199 . 



Vital Selection. 

narrowing of the general idea into 
the limits of a genuine, breathing 
human spirit its depth and reality are 
finally" disclosed with almost over- 
whelming impressiveness. Vague 
generalizations have no power to 
inspire the artist ; success in this 
highest and most permanent of all 
forms of expression depends on defi- 
nite, clearly realized, strongly marked 
types ; and the more perfect the type 
the wider and more complete the rev- 
elation of the general truth which is 
made through it. 

This law not only governs in the 
world of art, but also in the world of 
mind and character. Original, crea- 
tive persons do not attain power and 
influence by the method of aggrega- 
tion, by adding knowledge to knowl- 
edge ; they attain full self-unfolding 
by developing what is germinal with- 



Vital Selection. 

in them along natural lines ; they 
grow by the expansion which comes 
from appropriating that which vitally 
relates itself to them. The vocabu- 
lary of such persons is not made up 
of generalized words ; it is in the 
highest degree specialized ; it is so 
completely individualized that the 
stamp of ownership is visible on every 
sentence. The words are grasped 
close to the roots, where they are 
most succulent and fresh. This is 
the secret of picturesque, vivid, first- 
hand style; which is never compos- 
ite or derivative, but always simple, 
immediate, and intensely personal. 
It is the peculiar peril of this age that 
there are so many things to obscure 
the working of this law. The oppor- 
tunities of study and travel are so 
great that the age tends to a fascin- 
ating but unproductive eclecticism in 



Vital Selection. 

education, philosophy, and religion, 
rather than to a high and fertile orig- 
inality. Active minds, full of curi- 
osity and eager to explore the round 
world in quest of the new, the fresh, 
and the unknown, waste and debili- 
tate themselves by endeavoring to 
take into themselves that which is not 
related to them and which they can- 
not assimilate. They add to their 
knowledge, but they do not add to 
their power. Their minds are like 
many houses into which one goes, at 
this end of the century, which are 
furnished from the scourings of the 
globe, but are without harmony or 
individuality of taste, order, or orna- 
ment; private museums, filled with 
fragments and survivals of civiliza- 
tions, odds and ends of the centu- 
ries. This, it need hardly be said, 
is not home-making ; it is not the 

202 



Vital Selection. 

fruit of the art spirit ; it is simply- 
collecting, which is a very different 
matter. 

The universal range of the mind, 
without definite aim, indiscriminate, 
omnivorous, excited, does not secure 
education, freedom, power, or origi- 
nality. It is a vicious method ; it 
results in a derivative instead of a 
creative life of the mind, and it in- 
volves a slow decay of individuality. 
Men and women who fall victims to 
this temptation to waste their force 
over a wide field instead of intensi- 
fying it by concentration, become at 
last vague generalizations of the vital 
principle rather than clear, powerful, 
and commanding types. In their 
endeavor to grasp all, they forget 
that truth comes not by searching, 
but by growing; that it cannot be 
gathered here and there by the tour- 
203 



Vital Selection. 

ist, but must be patiently absorbed 
and assimilated. 

The capacity for truth is exactly 
measured by the capacity to incorpor- 
ate it into character. Beyond the 
limits of that capacity it is impos- 
sible to go, strive and struggle as 
we may. We can only take in that 
knowledge which is vitally related 
to us. We may go on indefinitely 
adding facts, knowledge, ideas which 
are not related to us, but we are 
neither enriched by them nor can we 
command them. They do not be- 
long to us ; they often encumber 
and smother us. In electing to be 
original and creative, to make any 
real contribution to life, or to secure 
the fullest development which life 
affords, one must elect to pass by a 
great deal of knowledge because it is 
impossible to absorb it. The tree, 
204 



Vital Selection. 

which lives by an infallible instinct, 
if such a phrase is permissible, takes 
out of the soil and the atmosphere 
those things which feed it, in quanti- 
ties which it can absorb. In like 
manner a human soul can take out 
of life only those elements which be- 
long to it by reason of affinity with 
its type. It must leave other ele- 
ments alone; they belong to other 
types of mind and character. One 
may ht either an Oriental or an Occi- 
dental, but one cannot be both with- 
out a confusion of fundamental ideas 
which goes to the very bottom of 
one's nature ; and yet this is pre- 
cisely what a great many people are 
trying to be to-day. If one wishes 
to have a complete and rounded 
personality and to avoid being a het- 
erogeneous collection of unrelated and 
inharmonious parts, one must under- 
205 



Vital Selection. 

stand his own type and appropriate 
those things which are vitally related 
to it. The artist, the man who 
strives after perfection, is revealed, as 
Schiller says, quite as much by what 
he discards as by what he accepts. 
Rejection is quite as important as 
selection, in a fully developed and 
productive life. 



206 



chapter XX. 

Repose. 

^T^HE process of growth, with the 
evidences of which the world 
overflows, is as mysterious as the 
vital principle behind it. We can 
lay our hands on all sides on its 
results ; but we never actually see 
it. We cannot accurately mark its 
stages, nor can we exactly measure it 
by time duration ; we can say of it, 
however, that it is the unfolding 
of that which lies in the germ by 
the appropriation of those elements 
which assimilate with it. There is 
one quality which everywhere char- 
acterizes it, — the quality of repose. 
207 



Repose. 

The living thing that grows, what- 
ever its form, surrenders itself en- 
tirely to the process. It does not 
vacillate between differ&nt aims ; it 
is in no uncertainty as to its type ; 
it makes no experiments in the choice 
of the elements upon which it is to 
draw^ sustenance. By the law under 
which it lives it selects the things 
which it needs, and opens itself to 
their reception. It is always expand- 
ing, and it is always in repose. Deep 
and genuine growth is conditioned on 
repose ; for repose implies neither 
sluggishness nor inactivity ; it means 
quietness and calmness at the centre 
of activity. Emerson long ago noted, 
as others had noted before him, that 
the Greek heroes, no matter how 
strenuously engaged, are always in 
repose. In this attitude, it need 
hardly be said, these typical figures 
208 



Repose. 

are in harmony with the spirit of 
Greek art; an art which was close 
to Nature, and which is still, in 
many of its aspects, the most com- 
plete expression and interpretation 
of Nature. 

This quality of repose which lies 
in the very heart of Greek art is 
an evidence of the profound artistic 
instinct of the Greek race. It was 
the pecuHar gift, not of a sluggish, 
but of an intensely alert and active 
people. It was, therefore, a positive, 
not a negative, quality ; something 
essential to the very nature of their 
art. And the more closely we study 
that art the clearer and more pro- 
found becomes its significance. Re- 
pose is part of its perfection ; in a 
sense, the very soul of it. For it 
was born of a clear perception of 
ends ; a clear adjustment and meas- 

H 209 



Repose. 

urement of means ; complete accord 
between the worker and his work. 
There are no signs of agitation, rest- 
lessness, nervousness, or -uncertainty 
in the Greek plays, the Greek statues, 
or the Greek buildings. There is 
deep thought ; there is definite con- 
viction ; there is profound feeling ; 
there are evidences of tireless work : 
but all these diverse elements and 
forces are subjected so completely 
in the artist's mastery of his mate- 
rials that they are held in the poise 
of final repose. The repose is the 
more significant because this art, of 
all the art men have created, was the 
most natural and spontaneous. It 
was the direct fruit of the life behind 
it ; the natural expression of the 
race which fashioned it. Repose 
is the key to the universality of 
Greek art and to the perfection of 



Repose. 

the types which it produced. It 
separates that art at once and forever 
from the art of the moment, and 
from the art of the provinces. It 
owes its supremacy to the quahties 
which are fused together in the re- 
pose which hes at its heart. 

There is nothing more impressive 
as an exhibition of power than the 
expansion of a great tree, and its 
power of resisting the storms and 
winds; but that process is soundless. 
Eternal quiet seems to brood in the 
shadow of this miracle of strength 
and silence. The depth and range 
of the growth of the human spirit 
are conditioned on a kindred repose. 
Man must really rest in Nature if he 
is to be fed. It is true, there must 
come, in every life, crises of emotion, 
thought, and action, but these crises 
are exceptional ; they are not normal 

211 



Repose. 

conditions. They are transitional, 
not permanent. One passes through 
them, if he learns what they have 
to give, into a deeper 'repose; for 
repose, in the last analysis, is adjust- 
ment to the conditions of life, sound 
and true relations with the things 
which surround us. It is, therefore, 
not a matter of temperament; it is 
the fundamental condition in all free 
and harmonious growth. The man 
who is in haste is always out of rela- 
tion to things ; he has forgotten 
something, he has not given himself 
time enough to accomplish the work 
he has in hand, or he has undertaken 
more than he can execute. His haste 
implies maladjustment ; it means that 
he has blundered, or that he is inade- 
quate to the task he has assumed. 
If a man has secured a true adjust- 
ment to his conditions and opportu- 

212 



Repose. 

nities and holds right relations to his 
world, he may bear great burdens and 
carry on vast activities without agita- 
tion or restlessness. The man of 
most heroic labor is often the man of 
calmest manner and voice ; while the 
man in whom haste is so evident that 
his very presence wearies and irritates 
is generally superficial and ineffective. 
Mastery is attained by those only 
who keep their minds in quietness. 
The vaster the responsibilities and 
the more intense the activities, the 
deeper the need of perfect poise. 
Napoleon was never so cool as in 
those critical moments when the 
issue of the battle hung in the bal- 
ance. A lyric may be written in 
the exaltation of great excitement, 
but the writing of a Divine Comedy 
necessitates a repose so deep and en- 
during that the agitations and anguish 
213 



Repose. 

of life are, by its very vastness, 
robbed of their terror. Haste is 
fatal to noble work ; agitation de- 
stroys the possibility of permanent 
achievement. The travellers who 
really see and are able to give intel- 
ligent reports of the countries through 
which they pass are not those v/ho, 
by the rapidity of their movement, 
envelop themselves in clouds of 
dust ; the men and women who dis- 
cern with level vision the real con- 
ditions in society do not, by the 
violence of their emotions, surround 
themselves by blinding storms. Rich 
natures have all the elements of pas- 
sion, imagination, and emotion which 
shake the earth and blot out the 
heavens ; but natures which translate 
such possibilities into character and 
achievement hold these elemental 
forces in absolute control. Art is, 
214 



Repose. 

by its very nature, in eternal antag- 
onism with haste, agitation, restless- 
ness, or violence. 

In the stimulating air of this con- 
tinent this lesson of calmness and 
repose is sorely needed. A vast 
amount of our energy goes out in 
sterile activity. We rush from one 
kind of knowledge to another, eager, 
breathless, and excited, and forget 
that culture — the real mastery of 
knowledge — is not a fruit to be 
plucked by a quick motion, but a 
fertility which follows the silent fall- 
ing of the rain and the slow enrich- 
ment of the invisible soil. Abnormal 
nervous excitability is often confused 
in this country with intellectual activ- 
ity ; nerves are mistaken for brains, 
and the restlessness of the one for 
the productivity of the other. Nerves 
are of immense importance, but they 

215 



Repose. 

are distinctly non-creative. They 
have never developed a great thought, 
nor given even a passing inspiration 
to art. Many Americans move from 
point to point, from interest to inter- 
est, so constantly that they live in a 
cloud of dust, which overhangs the 
highway and hides the heavens. We 
trample the earth until it becomes 
hard under our feet instead of per- 
mitting it to become rich and fertile. 
We rush headlong over delicate 
growths, instead of tenderly and 
piously fostering them. 

Riding one day over the plains at 
the end of a long detachment of men. 
General Custer made a sudden change 
of direction at the head of the column. 
As the men reached a certain point 
they rode off to the right, rank after 
rank, as if an invisible hand had smit- 
ten them out of their course. The 
216 



Repose. 

curiosity of those at the rear of the 
line was excited, and as they ap- 
proached the point they looked care- 
fully to see what had caused the 
change of direction, and they found 
in the desert a bird's nest full of tiny 
eggs. A long detachment of men 
had turned aside rather than crush 
that bit of life in the universal aridity ! 
There is a parable in that incident 
which Americans would do well to 
study. 

A man must have quiet and soli- 
tude in order to find himself, — one 
of the great ends of human seeking. 
There are many who find knowledge 
but do not find themselves, and their 
knowledge remains, therefore, unpro- 
ductive. No man can go home to 
himself until he has separated him- 
self from the crowd. We cannot be 
fed either by Nature or experience 
217 



Repose. 

until we are open to receive delicate 
and elusive impressions ; and, a rest- 
less nature is not sensitive to impres- 
sions. It throws them^ off because 
it is too much preoccupied and per- 
turbed. The greatest literary artist 
we have yet produced on this conti- 
nent passed nearly twelve years in 
entire obscurity. Those years of 
repose and silence guarded and nour- 
ished a genius of singular delicacy and 
purity, and permitted its possessor. to 
sink the roots of his thought deep 
into the historic soil beneath him, to 
saturate himself with the life behind 
him, to learn by a thousand contacts 
through his imagination the subtle 
forms of human experience which he 
was to interpret with a power so 
finely trained for its task. They 
made possible also the full develop- 
ment of that marvellous style which 
218 



Repose. 

so perfectly combines beauty and flex- 
ibility with sensitiveness to receive 
and power to convey the most com- 
plex and elusive impressions. It is 
impossible to imagine the genius of 
Hawthorne repining in restlessness 
and agitation. The solitude and 
isolation which, like a calyx, pro- 
tected the growth of his genius were 
favorable to, but were not essential 
to, repose of spirit. One may secure 
and preserve that repose in the tur- 
bulence of a great city, — as Shaks- 
peare surely found and preserved 
it in the London of the sixteenth 
century. For repose does not de- 
pend on external conditions ; it 
depends on sound adjustment to 
tasks, opportunities, pleasures, and 
the general order of life. 



219 



Chapter XXI. 

The Universal Life. 

'/^N every height," says Goethe, 
" there lies repose." Mere 
altitude, by effacing the limits and 
boundaries which shut in the view on 
every side, calms the spirit and stead- 
ies the nerves. The sense of pres- 
sure, of limitation, so constant and 
often so oppressive in the routine 
of ordinary life, vanishes, and then 
comes in its place a sudden exhilara- 
tion. For there is something liber- 
ating in the mere physical range of 
a great view ; it not only relieves 
the eyes from the presence of things 
which limit the vision, but it conveys 
220 



The Universal Life. 

the impression of universality. The 
fields merge into the landscape, the 
counties become states, and states 
are lost in the vast expanse of the 
continent. From some of the higher 
Alps one looks down, not on Swit- 
zerland or France, but on Europe ; 
from the summits of the Rockies 
one sees, north and south, the sub- 
lime range of hills which binds half 
the western hemisphere into one. 

Every mountain summit suggests 
to the imagination that totality of 
life of which the individual life is 
part. The county has its own au- 
tonomy, but it is a feeble political 
entity compared with the more in- 
clusive authority of the state ; the 
state, however powerful, is but a sub- 
division of the Republic ; and the 
Republic, in turn, but one member 
of a great group of nations. Every 

221 



The Universal Life. 

political entity has its own independ- 
ent life, but the depth and power of 
that life depend quite as much on 
the closeness of its contact with civ- 
ilization as on the nourishment 
which it draws through its roots from 
its own soil ; for the germ cannot 
secure complete expansion unless 
it is fed on all sides by substances 
which it can assimilate because they 
are harmonious with it. The meas- 
ure of savagery is the isolation of the 
tribe ; the measure of civilization is 
the variety, the number, and the close- 
ness of the contacts of a people with 
the world at large. In like manner, 
the individual life must hold individ- 
uality and universality in right and 
sound relations ; it must have its 
depth of root, but it must also have 
its breadth of interest, knowledge, and 
relationship. The totality of things 

222 



The Universal Life. 

is involved in every minutest mani- 
festation of life, as perfection of de- 
tail is involved in the splendor and 
completeness of the whole. The 
endless profusion of exquisite forms 
which the ferns, strewn with a lavish 
hand in the depths of the woods, 
take on implies the inexpressible 
beauty of the universe; while the 
majesty of systems sweeping through 
space hint at the loveliness of the wild- 
flower hidden beside the rock in the 
wildest and most inaccessible wood 
of the smallest world in all the shin- 
ing company. To keep ourselves 
in constant touch with the totality 
of things is, therefore, a primary law 
of sound living. It is the whole 
globe which ultimately sustains the 
growing tree, not the bit of soil on 
which it stands ; it is the entire vital- 
izing power of the sun which touches 
223 



The Universal Life. 

and vivifies it, not a group of de- 
tached rays. There are no boun- 
dary lines in Nature. It is a matter of 
indifference to her where France ends 
and Spain begins, where Europe 
touches her eastern limits and Asia 
erects her western gates. In Nature 
all things are held in indissoluble 
union ; nothing is isolated or de- 
tached : for isolation and detachment 
in the physical order mean death. 
In every part the whole is implied, 
and every detail of creative structure 
or life affirms the unity and solidarity 
of the universe. 

In this, as in every other sphere 
of choice, decision, and action, com- 
plete living lies in harmonizing two 
apparently antagonistic tendencies. 
That antagonism is, however, more 
apparent than real. In the perfec- 
tion of the fern lies the promise of 
224 



The Universal Life. 

the perfection of the universe ; in the 
perfection of the individual type lies 
the promise of the perfection of 
humanity ; in the definiteness with 
which the particular idea is realized 
lies the clearness with which the gen- 
eral idea is revealed. In the arts 
the universal ideas cannot be ex- 
pressed, or even hinted at, save by 
means of persons, forms, and sym- 
bols of the most sharply defined char- 
acter. Every work of art approaches 
perfection in the degree in which it 
is concrete and definite ; the more 
limited the form the more clear the 
disclosure of the universal idea. 
The earlier sculptors endeavored to 
express universal ideas by vast, 
confused, and often incongruous 
symbols, and failed ; The Greeks ob- 
tained absolute clearness and perfec- 
tion of harmonious, sharply defined, 

IS 225 



The Universal Life. 

and concrete illustration, and suc- 
ceeded where their predecessors had 
attained only a blurred confusion of 
impressions. In the drama this law 
is strikingly and constantly disclosed, 
on the one hand, in the inability of 
vague and indefinite characters or 
action to reveal general truths, and, 
on the other, by the swiftness and 
certainty with which the mind is car- 
ried beyond clearly drawn persons to 
the laws of life or the universal sig- 
nificance of certain typical character- 
istics. In fiction also one finds the 
most interesting and impressive illus- 
tration of this fundamental law of ex- 
pression. Such characters as Becky 
Sharp and Colonel Newcome, as Pere 
Goriot and Eugenie Grandet, as 
Annie Karenina and Sonia, as 
Madame Bovary and Effie Deans, 
are as clearly realized in our thought 
226 



The Universal Life. 

as the persons whose hands we grasp 
and with whom we have daily speech, 
— and yet each one is a principle of 
life incarnate ; each one is so iden- 
tified with a general truth that the 
character and truth are really identi- 
cal in our thought. It is, in a word, 
through the perfection of individual- 
ity that universality becomes clear. 

This perfection depends, however, 
in no small degree, on a well-devel- 
oped and trained consciousness of con- 
stant contact with the totality of things. 
One never really knows his own 
country until he knows the world ; 
one never really knows himself until 
he knows humanity. The sense of 
being part of the great order of 
things, of being vitally related to the 
whole race, of being involved in a 
world-wide historical movement, 
brings with it a quieting and calming 
227 



The Universal Life. 

influence. Individual sorrow, suf- 
fering, and limitation lose the exag- 
gerated importance with which our 
feelings invest them when we recog- 
nize the range and depth of the move- 
ment of universal life. One may 
become excited when he looks exclu- 
sively at the affairs of his own neigh- 
borhood, but a glimpse of the 
universe makes that excitement ap- 
pear unreal and ridiculous. The 
sense of proportion is freshened by 
the consciousness of relation to the 
totality of things, and the sense of 
proportion is one of the signs of 
sanity. 

The sense of exhilaration which 
fills the soul when one slips out of 
the individual into the universal 
mood in some hour of mountain 
climbing, in some fortunate day on 
the summits, was often felt by 
228 



The Universal Life. 

Amiel even in his despondency. "A 
marvellous day," he writes in July, 
1870. *' The panorama before me 
is of grandiose splendour; it is a 
symphony of mountains, a cantata of 
sunny Alps. . . . The feeling upper- 
most is one of delight in being able 
to admire ; of joy, that is to say, in a 
recovered power of contemplation 
which is the result of physical relief, 
in being able at last to forget myself 
and surrender myself to things, as 
befits a man in my state of health. 
Gratitude is mingled with enthusi- 
asm. I have just spent two hours 
at the foot of the Sparrenhorn, the 
peak behind us. A flood of sensa- 
tions overpowered me. I could only 
look ; feel, dream, and think." Five 
years earlier, in the same mood, he 
wrote : " 1 have not yet felt the air 
so pure, so life-giving, so etherial, 
229 



The Universal Life. 

during the five days I have been 
here. To breathe is a beatitude. 
One understands the delights of a 
bird's existence, — that emancipation 
from all encumbering weight, — that 
luminous and empyrean life, floating 
in blue space, and passing from one 
horizon to another with a stroke of 
the wing. One must have a great 
deal of air below one before one can 
be conscious of such inner freedom 
as this, such lightness of the whole 
being. Every element has its poetry, 
but the poetry of air is liberty." 



230 



Chapter XXII. 

The Unconscious Life. 

pERHAPS the greatest refresh- 
ment which men gain from 
Nature at this end of the century- 
flows from the unconsciousness in 
which her forces are put forth 
and her processes carried on. The 
unconsciousness of childhood, says 
Froebel, is rest in God, — a deep 
saying, which goes far to explain 
a great deal of current scepticism 
and pessimism. For nothing breeds 
doubt and despair so quickly as a 
constant and feverish self-conscious- 
ness, with inability to look at life 
and the world apart from our own in- 
231 



The Unconscious Life. 

terests, emotions, and temperament. 
This is, in an exceptional degree, 
an epoch of morbid egoism, of 
exaggerated and excessive self-con- 
sciousness; an egoism which does 
not always breed vanity, but which 
confirms the tendency to measure 
everything by its value to us, and to 
decide every question on the basis of 
our personal relation to it. It is 
always unwise to generalize too 
broadly and freely about contempor- 
ary conditions, but there are many 
facts to bear out the statement that 
at no previous period in the history 
of the world have so many men and 
women been keenly and painfully 
self-conscious ; never a time when it 
has been so difficult to look at things 
broadly and objectively, to see things 
as they are with entire sanity of soul 
and clearness of vision. All the arts 
232 



The Unconscious Life. 

are saturated with morbid self-con- 
sciousness ; in literature especially, 
sane, wholesome, and real books in 
certain departments have become 
exceptional. Pathology has usurped 
the place of art, and the artist has 
become a specialist in diseases of the 
nerves. Every morbid nature rushes 
into print, until the weary reader of 
current fiction is tempted to think 
that the making of a modern novel 
involves nothing more unusual in 
the way of gifts than a diseased mind, 
a bottle of ink, a few reams of paper, 
and a friendly or speculative pub- 
lisher. Introspective meditation, 
egotistical personal records, crude 
yearnings, immature ambitions, sickly 
emotions, unwholesome or prema- 
ture passions, are spread out before 
the world with a fulness of detail of 
which only the wholesome and eter- 
233 



The Unconscious Life. 

nal verities of character and experi- 
ence are worthy. Poor human 
nature, as illustrated in some modern 
fiction and verse, seems to have gone 
mad with the passion for publicity, 
and stands naked in the public 
squares, content with any shame if 
only people will look at it. The hos- 
pital and the dissecting-room have 
become places of habitual resort, and 
every morning this humanity of ours, 
whose diseases we used to shield from 
public gaze, is laid out on the operat- 
ing table while the surgeon cuts down 
to the last quivering nerve for our en- 
tertainment. It seems at times as if 
fiction had become a vast clinic, with- 
out the hush and awe with which 
human suffering has always been wit- 
nessed by the pure-minded. Morbid 
curiosity has bred an irreverence 
which violates the innermost sanctity 
234 



The Unconscious Life. 

of the human soul. How far this 
attitude is from that of a really de- 
vout and noble nature! " We are 
struck by something bewildering and 
ineffable when we look down into the 
depths of an abyss," writes Amiel ; 
"and every soul is an abyss, a mystery 
of love and pity. A sort of sacred 
emotion descends upon me whenever 
I penetrate the recesses of this sanc- 
tuary of man, and hear the gentle 
murmur of the prayers, hymns, and 
supplications which rise from the 
hidden depths of the heart." We 
have become so egoistic that we 
would rather show our deformities 
than be passed without notice. 

From this heated atmosphere and 
from these representations of disease, 
put forth as reproductions of normal 
life, we fly to Nature, and are led 
away from all thought of ourselves. 
23s 



The Unconscious Life. 

We escape out of individual into 
universal life ; we bathe in the heal- 
ing waters of an illimitable ocean of 
vitality; we come into contact with a 
mighty organism which continually 
receives and as constantly gives out, 
in perfect unconsciousness of its 
functions. In health we hardly know 
that we have bodies ; we breathe, 
move, and live without taking 
thought. Pain is physical self-con- 
sciousness, and when self-conscious- 
ness becomes a positive element in 
our lives it is an evidence of disease. 
A perfectly sane nature, perfectly ad- 
justed to its time, its task, and its 
fellows, and expressing itself nor- 
mally through normal activities, is 
free from abnormal self-conscious- 
ness, and therefore free to pour all 
its power into objective and creative 
work. For nothing limits normal 
236 



The Unconscious Life. 

growth and expression so inevitably 
as consciousness of self. In the dif- 
fusion of this morbid consciousness 
hes^ the explanation of the obvious 
limitation of so much genius, talent, 
and beauty which ought to have been 
large and free and sane. The talent 
of men like Leopardi and Verlaine 
commands the most generous recog- 
nition ; but it is sheer blindness to 
accept such men as authoritative in- 
terpreters of life. Both were dis- 
eased ; neither was sane in the real 
sense of the word, and neither saw 
life as it is, any more than the man 
in a fever, looking through the hos- 
pital window, sees Nature as she is. 
Byron, with the most powerful and 
spontaneous lyrical gift which has 
appeared in English literature since 
the days of the Elizabethans, could 
not escape from himself, and, when 
237 



The Unconscious Life. 

he attempted to deal with the prob- 
lem of personality, painfully revealed 
his incapacity. Intensely self-con- 
scious, he lost the power of seeing 
and reflecting life broadly and simply, 
and parted with that clearness and 
breadth of vision with which the 
really great poet must supplement 
the gift of song. Such a man, on 
the other hand, as we have reason to 
believe Shakspeare to have been, 
presents the entire surface of his 
mind to the world unvexed by a mor- 
bid sense of self, and reflects the 
whole order of things, as the still 
surface of the water gathers into it- 
self the landscape and the sky. If 
for a single generation we could lose 
our abnormal self-consciousness and 
live simply, reverently, and actively, 
the whole race would be reinvigor- 
ated ; we should see things as they 
238 



The Unconscious Life. 

are, and not as they appear in our 
distorted vision ; for society is full 
of sick people who see themselves 
more distinctly than they see any- 
thing else, and we have been taking. 
our reports and interpretations of life 
largely from sick men and women, 
forgetful of the fact that, however 
interesting such reports may be, and 
however artistic in form, as revela- 
tions and records they are absolutely 
worthless. The sane mind is the 
only mind that can authoritatively 
report or interpret the immense 
diversity and range of experience 
which we call life, because it is the 
only mind that can see life. 

The secret of productive living lies 
in the preponderance of the uncon- 
scious over the conscious life ; for 
we do not really possess an experi- 
ence or a truth until these things 
239 



The Unconscious Life. 

have become so much a part of our- 
selves that we have ceased to think 
of them as distinct from ourselves. 
Feeling, experience, conviction, tra- 
dition, never find noble expression 
in art until they have sunk far below 
the conscious into the unconscious 
life of a man or a race; the artist has 
not gained complete freedom of ex- 
pression until he has completely mas- 
tered the material in which he works 
and the instrument which he em- 
ploys. So long as he is hampered 
by the consciousness of himself in 
dealing with them, he falls short of 
mastery. It is significant that the 
descriptions of childhood are often 
impressive and beautiful in books 
which deal very feebly and ineffec- 
tively with the experiences of 
maturity. The reason is obvious. 
Childhood lies so far back in our 
240 



The Unconscious Life. 

experience that it has become part of 
ourselves. We do not reproduce it 
by observation ; we do not possess it 
because we have consciously studied 
it ; it possesses us because it is part 
of our deepest selves. It lies there, 
as we look back upon it, in a light 
at once clear and soft, apart from our 
self-consciousness; a vision of that 
which we once were. Those moun- 
tains which so often appear in Titian's 
pictures were the hills which gathered 
about the home of his childhood, and 
became so much a part of his mem- 
ory that his whole life seemed to be 
lived at their feet. To drain into 
ourselves the rivulets of power which 
flow through Nature, art, and expe- 
rience, we must hold ourselves open 
on all sides ; we must empty our- 
selves of ourselves in order to make 
room for the truth and power which 

i6 241 



The Unconscious Life. 

come to us through knowledge and 
action ; we must lose our abnormal 
self-consciousness in rich and free 
relations with the universal life 
around us ; we must turn our con- 
scious feeling, acting, and living into 
unconscious feeling, acting, and liv- 
ing. For the more a man can learn 
to do instinctively and uncon- 
sciously, the more complete will be 
his emancipation from the drudgery 
of living, and the more complete 
his freedom to develop his own 
personality. 



242 



Chapter XXIII. 

Solitude and Silence. 

'"T^HE sense of freedom which 
"*• comes when one goes into the 
deep woods is something more than 
the satisfaction of a physical need ; 
it is the satisfaction of a spiritual 
need, — the need of isolation, detach- 
ment, solitude. To the mind fatigued 
by constant and rapid readjustments 
to different subjects and to diverse 
tasks, the quiet and seclusion of the 
woods are like a healing balm. The 
pleasure they bring with them is so 
keen and so real that it is almost 
sensuous. One feels as if he had 
found himself after a long period of 
243 



Solitude and Silence. 

wandering ; as if he had come to 
himself after a touch of delirium. 
The silence is sedative and the soli- 
tude a tonic ; relaxation and rein- 
vigoration are both at hand. 

The instinct which impels us to 
get away from our fellows is as nor- 
mal as that which constantly draws 
us to them ; we cannot really live 
without them, we cannot really live 
with them ! Here, as elsewhere, the 
highest growth involves the harmo- 
nization of two apparently opposing 
conditions, — the condition of isola- 
tion and that of association. These 
are the centrifugal and the centripetal 
forces which, in apparent opposition, 
work together for our complete de- 
velopment. The perfection of the 
citizen — the man in association with 
other men — depends first of all on 
the perfection of the individuality. 
244 



Solitude and Silence. 

A man must be self-centred, self- 
sustained, and complete in himself 
before he can carry any real power or 
character into specific relationships ; 
a tree must have independent root- 
age before it can take to itself the 
elements of life and growth about it. 
No man can give the highest im- 
pulses and thoughts to his fellows 
until he is, in a certain sense, inde- 
pendent of them ; the visions of the 
prophet come in the desert or on the 
lonely summit of the hill. His duty 
is to his fellows ; but much of the 
truth of which he is the mouthpiece 
is revealed to him when he is wrapped 
about with silence and solitude. 
That which is individual in us, and 
which makes us distinct and different 
from all other men, is fostered and de- 
veloped by solitude. In society one 
is constantly assailed by influences, 

245 



Solitude and Silence. 

views, convictions, temperamental 
attitudes which are alien and often 
antagonistic. One needs the attrition 
of these differences ; but one needs, 
first of all, something in himself which 
resists, — the power of a developed 
and self-conscious individuality. 

In solitude a man learns what is 
in him ; he makes terms with the 
power about him ; he comes into 
intelligent relations with the world 
which surrounds him. Solitude is 
essential to real thinking, and it is 
only by thinking that we arrive at a 
knowledge of ourselves and at the 
significance of experience. After a 
day of intense activity, of deep emo- 
tion, of sudden or momentous hap- 
penings, one feels the necessity of 
being alone in order to get at the 
meaning of what has taken place. 
The very experiences which are 
246 



Solitude and Silence. 

social in their character and which 
come to us only in company with 
our fellows are not completely ours 
until we have meditated upon them in 
some solitary place. It has often been 
said that a man is never so lonely as 
when in a crowd; for in a crowd it 
often happens that a man is not only- 
unacquainted with those who press 
upon him on every side, but is also 
separated from himself by the confu- 
sion, noise, and pressure. 

Individual gifts and qualities of 
all kinds are fostered by silence and 
solitude. Talent, Goethe tells us, 
is developed in solitude ; but char- 
acter, in the stream of the world. 
Before the metal can be tempered 
and hammered into shape, it must 
have individual quality ; and it is 
this quality which a man carries with 
him into the world. A full life in- 
247 



Solitude and Silence. 

volves habitual meditation ; a contin- 
ual play of the mind on all the 
elements and events which come 
within the range of vision. 

It is significant that the faces of 
those who have interpreted life most 
fruitfully and nobly have the medi- 
tative cast ; they bear the impress of 
secret thought. Men of executive 
force may dispense in a measure with 
privacy; but men of artistic or phil- 
osophical genius must guard it with 
jealous care. If they lose it, they 
part with something essential to their 
development. The happiest and 
most productive years in the life of 
a man of letters, or of an artist in 
any department, are often the years of 
obscurity ; the long, leisurely years 
of silence and seclusion, beautiful 
with dreams and rich in the work 
which is play. When Fame comes, 
248 



Solitude and Silence. 

the crowd comes with her, and 
thenceforth the man must fight for 
the very life of his gift. In nothing 
is the public so remorseless as in the 
wasting of the time and substance of 
the man whom it elects to crown 
with popularity. It often destroys 
when it means to caress ; it blights 
and saps when it means to nourish 
and reward. Fortunate is the man 
of artistic temper to whom fame 
comes so late that his habits are 
formed, his aims fixed, and his tem- 
per become as steel in its power of 
resistance ! 

Every man owes it to his soul to 
take time for solitude ; to make 
place in his life for seclusion and 
silence. For the two are bound to- 
gether, — one may be lonely in an 
uproar, but one can hardly find soli- 
tude under such conditions. In the 
249 



Solitude and Silence. 

woods the very sounds make the 
silence more evident and refreshing. 
The murmur of pines, the song of 
birds, the rustle and fall of leaves, the 
ripple of the brook, conspire to pre- 
serve the essential silence even while 
they seem to violate it. They are 
sounds so detached from the world 
of society, so free from all association 
with it, that they deepen our feeling 
of detachment from it; they do not 
interrupt and disturb ; they soothe 
and harmonize. The quiet which 
reigns in the woods, so delicious to 
tired nerves and the spent mind, is 
not the repose of death, but the har- 
mony of a fathomless life ; it sug- 
gests, not effort and distraction, but 
ease and play; it is not so much 
absence of sound as harmony of 
sound. Life in human associations 
wearies us not because it is audi- 
250 



Solitude and Silence. 

ble, but because it is inharmonious ; 
because its sounds are not musical, 
but discordant. If they were musical 
they would fall on our ears like the 
chimes of Antwerp, which seem to 
rain pure melody from the clouds ; 
they would bring with them peace 
and rest. It is because they are born 
of discord and of unnatural and un- 
wholesome conditions that they dis- 
turb, irritate, and exhaust. 

In the woods the sounds are nor- 
mal, and they are, therefore, by con- 
trast with the sounds of human 
making, akin to silence. They rest 
:and refresh the nerves which dis- 
cords have Irritated and disturbed. 
When the nervous self-consciousness 
passes away with the passing of the 
conditions which developed it, and 
crowds are as remote as the roar they 
create, thought has a chance to play 
251 



Solitude and Silence. 

upon experience, to rationalize it, to 
study opportunities, to measure abil- 
ity with task, to develop in one a 
clear, v/holesome consciousness of 
self, and to adjust one intelligently to 
his environment. Through every 
fruitful life there must run a definite 
purpose and the habit of meditation ; 
and these are possible only to the 
man who can separate himself from 
his fellows and think out his per- 
sonal problem quietly, candidly, and 
fundamentally. When a man has 
justly measured himself and set him- 
self to do the work which he is 
equipped to accomplish, his freshness 
and productivity will depend on the 
fulness and continuity of his medi- 
tation ; the silent dwelling of the 
spirit on the deepest things of expe- 
rience and knowledge. 

252 



Chapter XXIV. 

Unhasting, Unresting. 

'T^HE unbroken continuity of the 
"*' activity of Nature is both baf- 
fling and suggestive. The garment 
which the world wears is seamless, 
and therefore eludes our search for 
the secrets of mechanism and manu- 
facture. The ' mystery and miracle 
of growth are behind it, and are still, 
after all our appliances and observa- 
tion, inexplicable. Season succeeds 
season without pause, but by grada- 
tions so gradual that we are never 
able to mark the points of transition. 
We can say " It is summer" or " It 
is autumn ; " we are never able to 
say " Here summer ends, here autumn 
253 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

begins." Invisibly and inaudibly the 
energy of life is put forth in verdure, 
leaf, bud, flower, and fruit ; always 
witnessing its presence by a thousand 
tokens and signs, but never reveal- 
ing the ways of its coming or the 
paths of its going. The beautiful 
procession has been moving across 
the fields and along the edges of the 
hills since time began ; blossom and 
fragrance have silently revealed its 
presence ; waving banners of red and 
gold have floated against the sky in 
golden autumnal days ; fallen leaves 
have whirled along the path of its 
receding splendor ; it has filled the eye 
with moving images and stirred the 
imagination with a thousand hints and 
impulses : but the secret of its endless 
variety, its fadeless pomp, the peren- 
nial freshness of its appeal through 
the senses to the soul, is inviolate. 
254 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

We know that the moving principle 
behind it is vital, and that the method 
of its working out and putting forth 
is that of growth ; but what life is in 
itself and how growth is accomplished 
we do not know. We have really 
large knowledge of the details of the 
manifestation of this wonderful force 
which streams through the universe, 
but of its nature we remain as igno- 
rant as our fathers were. The com- 
monest flower of the wayside is too 
wonderful for our intelligence. 

The beauty of this spendid display 
of the resources of life in Nature lies 
largely in the unbroken continuity 
with which energy flows forth and 
functions and ends are fulfilled. The 
work never pauses, and yet it is never 
obtruded ; it is always being accom- 
plished with incredible expenditure 
of force, and yet there is never a sign 
255 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

of strain or exhaustion. The work 
of the natural world is not toil, but 
play ; it is always going forward, and 
yet is absolutely free from haste and 
fret. Nature can produce a finished 
form in an hour, or she can spend a 
thousand years in the performance 
of a single task ; in both cases she is 
equally exact, thorough, and adequate 
in selection of material and use of 
instruments ; and she is also equally 
easeful, leisurely, and unhasting. She 
never rests and she never hastens ; 
she is always at her task and she is 
always at her ease. 

And in no aspect of her life is 
Nature more suggestive than in this 
fruitful repose, this energetic quiet- 
ness, this masterful ease. We fret 
and worry and strain ; we toil and 
groan and fall ; she goes calmly on 
with her play of forces and tools, 
256 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

and accomplishes ends which not only 
lie beyond our strength, but beyond 
our comprehension. The conditions 
under which her work is carried on 
are so different from those under 
which ours is performed that we must 
forbear to press the analogy too far ; 
but there remain certain resemblances 
which are neither forced nor mislead- 
ing, and from these resemblances there 
flow certain teachings which are vitally 
important in the productive human 
life. 

It is significant that the higher and 
more enduring the form of work is 
the closer the parallelism between the 
method of Nature and the method of 
man. The most barren, unreal, and 
useless form of human activity is the 
speculative, — which deals not with 
actual values, but with momentary 
impressions of values ; and there is 
17 257 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

no other occupation which engenders 
such heat, fever, strain, and excite- 
ment. In no other public place, in 
no other recognized occupation, is 
man so undignified, irrational, and 
rudimentary in expression and action 
as in a stock exchange on a day of 
rapidly advancing or declining prices. 
At the other end of the long line of 
human activity stands the artist ; the 
man who deals, not with the shifting 
estimations of things, but with their 
essential and enduring values, and 
whose work, beyond all other forms 
of work, is stamped by calmness and 
the fortitude of a long patience. 

When, in any occupation, a man 
rises to the dignity and power of the 
artist, he achieves this rare distinction, 
this supreme success, by conforming 
his working habits to the methods of 
Nature. His work is full of vitality, 
258 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

freshness, individuality, by virtue of 
the complete identification of his 
spirit and his methods, and of the 
entire harmony which he has reached 
between his power and his task. He 
has healed the schism which so con- 
stantly separates the worker from his 
work, and which breeds self-con- 
sciousness and produces irritation, 
haste, and a feverish anxiety. His 
work is not accomplished on material 
outside of his own nature ; it is ac- 
complished through himself. If he 
is a writer he constantly uses literary 
forms, but that which he gives the 
world through the medium of those 
forms is a certain view of things which 
he alone of all men has taken or is 
able to take ; and this view or inter- 
pretation of things is put forth not as 
a thing distinct from, but a part of, 
himself. If he is an orator he em- 
259 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

ploys language, tones, modulation, 
gesture, posture, facial expressions 
which may be observed and described ; 
but the charm of his speech lies in 
his personality, and it is that person- 
ality which captivates his auditors 
through all these media of utterance. 
In both these cases, and in the case 
of all men who attain mastery in any 
form of activity, the real work. Is 
accomplished within the nature of 
the man himself. 

And this result Is not secured 
by feverish intensity, by consuming 
haste ; on the contrary, these are the 
things which postpone and defeat it. 
The fruit in the orchard ripens 
through long days and quiet nights ; 
and the spirit of man must ripen 
under like conditions. It cannot be 
forced ; agitation and haste keep it 
immature, unreceptive, and sterile. 
260 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

It Is enriched and made powerful 
and productive by the habit of un- 
hasting, unresting work. The man 
who has learned the secret of substi- 
tuting growth for toil and of trans- 
forming work into play by making 
his work the normal and intimate 
expression of himself, never rests 
from his occupation. He is always 
at work. He is in a constant state 
of preparation, for he is always getting 
ready for the specific task by general 
enrichment. His hours of leisure are 
often more important than his hours 
of occupation, — so rich are they in 
the impressions and thoughts he is 
later to employ. A day in the woods 
often plants the seeds of half a dozen 
lyrics In a poet's soul; they ripen 
slowly or swiftly as the conditions 
determme: but putting them on 
paper, when the fit moment comes, 
261 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

is but the last step in a long series 
of stages each one of which marks 
the progression toward perfection. 
There has been, in this vital process, 
no moment of haste ; and there has 
been no moment of rest: there has 
been a continuous, almost unconscious 
growth of a work of art in the invis- 
ible workshop of the artist's soul. 

This appropriation of the vitaliz- 
ing and enriching power of all knowl- 
edge, observation, and experience is 
the real work of the master workmen 
of the world; the embodiment of 
these rare and precious elements of 
power in new and original forme is 
necessary to the completion of the 
work, but is not its most difficult 
part. This habit of never restmg 
and never hasting explains the fecun- 
dity of many of the great artists whose 
canvases line the walls of galleries or 
262 



Unhasting, Unresting. 

whose books fill the shelves of libra- 
ries. There is immense cumulative 
power in the industry which values 
all hours alike and turns them equally 
to account ; and there is great power 
of health and freshness in freedom 
from the haste which disturbs, Irri- 
tates, and exhausts. All moments are 
golden to him who uses them with 
equal wisdom ; all leisure is fruitful to 
him whose nature ripens in the mellow 
calm of afternoon no less than in the 
stirring morning air. To be always 
receiving the teachings of experience 
and the vitality of Nature, and giving 
them back in one's habitual occupa- 
tion, is to establish a true harmony 
between one's self and one's task, 
and, like Nature, to weave a seam- 
less robe out of the diverse threads 
and stuffs which come to the invisible 
loom. 

263 



Chapter XXV. 

Health. 

N the great writers we are im- 
pressed with a certain breadth 
and poise and sanity. They are 
simple, natural, direct; they deal 
with the universal experiences ; their 
work has a certain elemental quality 
which allies it with Nature. There 
is nothing exclusive in their thought, 
esoteric in their methods, or unsocial 
in their temper. They are free from 
idiosyncrasies, oddities, eccentricities. 
They are genuinely original, but they 
never surprise us ; they are pro- 
foundly true, but they never startle 
us with novelties. They produce 
264 



Health. 

the most lasting impressions by the 
simplest means. Their skill is re- 
vealed, not in cunningly devised 
tricks of rhyme and turns of speech, 
but in an easy and winning familiar- 
ity with the resources of human ex- 
perience and expression. Their 
workmanship is not artifice, but art, 
which is a very different matter. 
They fill us with an ample and tonic 
atmosphere; they give us the sweep 
of the horizon ; clear ski^s and sweet 
earth and wholesome life glow over 
or arise about us whenever we open 
their pages. They are free from the 
cant of professionalism, from the dry- 
ness of the study, from the phrase- 
ology of the schools, from all kinds 
of morbid self-consciousness ; they 
impress us as vigorous, wholesome 
men, dealing with normal things in 
a large, objective, healthy way. They 
265 



Health. 

represent a vitality raised above the 
average, not depressed below it ; a 
knowledge of life gained by mastery 
of the conditions of natural living, 
not by violation of them ; they give 
us the revelation which comes through 
superabundant health, not through 
debility and disease. These masters 
of the richest of the arts are not blind 
to the morbid and diseased condi- 
tions which exist among men ; they 
are not indiiferent to the hard and 
tragic fate which besets and baffles so 
many men and women ; they are not 
oblivious of the sadness and pathos 
which gather about every career, how- 
ever noble and effective, and enter 
into every experience. They are 
peculiarly sensitive to these dark and 
forbidding phases of the life of man 
in this mysterious world ; these are, 
indeed, the very phases and aspects 
266 



Health. 

which touch their imagination most 
deeply and appeal most powerfully 
to their thought. The tragic side of 
experience is the material out of 
which much of the greatest literature 
iscompounded; and in portraying the 
tragic hero and interpreting the tragic 
career the highest genius of the world 
has found its most absorbingand com- 
manding task. Agamemnon, CEdi- 
pus, Lear, Faust, and Pere Goriot are 
central figures in that world of the 
imagination with which the great 
writers have supplemented the world 
of reality. It is not difference of 
theme which separates as by a chasm 
the great sane masters of expression 
from the morbid and diseased inter- 
preters of human life ; it is clear- 
ness and sanity in dealing with these 
matters, — a true perspective, and a 
sound sense of proportion. A 
267 



Health. 

healthy man studies disease, compre- 
hends and describes it as disease ; a 
sick man treats it as normal. To the 
first, the world is wholesome and life 
is healthful, with a considerable per- 
centage of disease preying upon its 
vitality and diminishing its strength; 
to the second, sickness of soul 
and body are universal and natural. 
To the first, Nature is sweet and 
sound and the world is sane, with 
here and there a hospital to blot the 
landscape ; to the second, the uni- 
verse is a vast sick-room, with 
occasional glimpses of blue sky 
through the windows. The plays 
of iEschylus and Shakspeare solem- 
nize our thought and make us aware 
of the vast range of the elements 
which enter into the problem of life; 
but they affect us as Nature affects 
us, — with a sense of much hardness 
268 



Health. 

and of the presence of tragic forces, 
but also of a victorious vitality, an 
enormous reserve power of life. 
The plays of Maeterlinck, on tlie 
other hand, convey an impression of 
brooding and abnormal terror; a 
haunting sense of unseen and malig- 
nant powers ; we are in a world 
which is smitten with unreality by 
reason of the preponderance and 
supremacy of evil. The Odyssey is 
a noble example of a sane and health- 
ful book, full of vitality, change, stir, 
adventure ; full also of calamity, 
mischance, hardship, and suffering. 
But in the story, as in life seen with 
any breadth of view, the miseries and 
misfortunes are immensely overbal- 
anced by vitality and endurance. 
Ulysses has his moments of discour- 
agement, but he is superior to his 
fate. The charm of the story lies in 
269 



Health. 

its elemental breadth, simplicity and 
sanity. Its whole movement is out 
of doors; the sting of the brine is in 
it, but so also is the wild free breath 
of the sea; the roar of the surf on 
the rocks thunders through it, but 
there is also the clear sky and the 
shining stars. One feels that he is 
in a hard world, but It is a real world, 
— not a hospital, a mad-house, or a 
place of fantastic dreams. 

It is a deep and sound instinct 
which leads the man who has lost his 
health back to Nature. A great mass 
of sickness yields speedily to her 
silent ministrations. There is no 
medicine so potent as the sweet 
breath and the sweeter seclusion of 
the woods ; there is no tonic like a 
free life under the open sky. Insan- 
ity goes out of one's blood when the 
song of the pines is in one's ears and 
270 



Health. 

the rustle of leaves under one's feet. 
In the silence of the wood health 
waits like an invisible goddess, swift 
to divide her stores with every one 
who has faith enough to come to the 
shrine. And upon health in the fun- 
damental sense depends the power 
of seeing clearly, of feeling freshly, 
and of producing continuously. For 
health means harmony of life with 
the fundamental laws ; the accord 
between man and Nature which keeps 
him in touch with the sources of 
power. The man who is smitten 
with disease in mind or character 
often creates beautiful things ; but 
his production is sporadic and lim- 
ited. He is out of relation with the 
vital forces ; out of sympathy with 
the life of men in its deeper and 
nobler aspects. It is at this point 
and for this reason that great art and 
271 



Health. 

fundamental morals are bound to- 
gether in indissoluble bonds. The 
universe is not an accident, and man's 
life in it is not a matter of chance. 
The world and man are under the 
rule of certain laws which are not ar- 
bitrarily imposed by a superior power, 
but which are wrought into the very 
fibre of things. The artist who per- 
sistently violates those laws is not 
breaking a series of conventional 
rules ; he is violating his own nature, 
severing the vital ties which unite 
him to his fellows, filling up the 
channels through which power flows 
to him, and steadily diminishing his 
creative and productive energy. 
When disease assails the body, it 
invariably diminishes the working 
force in some direction ; when it fas- 
tens upon the character, it saps the 
strength which is essential to long- 
272 



Health. 

sustained and heroic tasks. A man 
cannot do the work of Dante, 
Michael Angelo, or Shakspeare if 
he lacks a clear head, a vigorous 
will, or a steady hand. Moral san- 
ity, health of soul, lie at the founda- 
tion of a great career in the higher 
fields of activity. To bear the fruits 
of life year after year, as the trees 
bear their fruits and the fields their 
grain, one must have that divine 
health which Nature distils in the 
woods or in the air of the great 
seas. 



i8 



273 



Chapter XXVI. 

Work and Play. 

I^TOTHING in natural processes 
■^ is more suggestive than the 

apparent ease with which the great- 
est power is put forth and the most 
diverse and difficult tasks accom- 
plished. Nature never rests, and yet 
is always in repose ; she never ceases 
.to work, and yet always appears to 
be at play. The expenditure of 
power involved in the change from 
winter to summer is incalculable ; 
but the change is accomplished so 
quietly and by such delicate grada- 
tions that it is impossible to associate 
the idea of toil with it. There is no 
strenuous putting forth of force ; 
274 



Work and Play. 

there is rather the overflow of a 
fathomless life. The tide of life 
runs to the summit of the remotest 
mountain which nourishes a bit of 
verdure as easily as the water sweeps 
in from the sea when the tide turns 
and the creeks and inlets begin to 
sing once more in the music of 
returning waves. The secret of this 
silent, invisible, easy play of force 
and accomplishment of ends lies per- 
haps in perfect adaptation of instru- 
ment to task, in absence of friction, 
incomplete harmony between power, 
methods, and ultimate aims. The 
entire harmony which characterizes 
Nature in her unconsciousness is not 
possible to man in his consciousness ; 
but the conditions under which the 
life of Nature manifests itself and 
bears its manifold fruits is rich in 
hints and suggestions. At no point 
275 



Work and Play. 

is the analogy between that life, in 
certain of its aspects, and the life of 
man more striking and helpful. 

The secret of heroic work is har- 
mony between the man and his task; 
an adjustment so complete that the 
putting forth of strength in a specific 
direction becomes as natural and in- 
stinctive as breathing or walking. So 
long as we toil, we are slaves, and the 
labor of the slave is always stamped 
with a certain inferiority. Toil in- 
volves drudgery, and is mechanical 
and perfunctory ; it is devoid of per- 
sonality, beauty, or power ; it implies 
a dominating force accomplishing its 
ends by sheer authority, not a free hu- 
man spirit giving its vitality full play. 
When toil becomes work, drudgery 
gives place to a conscientious and 
often cheerful expenditure of power 
and surrender of ease. The worker 
276 



Work and Play. 

is free, and puts his heart and soul into 
his work with the joy of one who 
serves his own high aims rather than 
bends unwillingly to an authority 
stronger than his own personality. In 
its subordination of the minor to the 
major motives of living, its quiet 
substitution of the lower for the 
higher pleasures, its discipline, and 
its self-sacrifice, work, instead of be- 
ing the traditional curse of the race, 
is its blessing, its happiness, and its 
reward. The heroic workers of the 
world are the men whose tasks and 
achievements are most enviable ; 
they are lifted above themselves by 
absorption in great undertakings; 
they are engrossed in occupations 
which not only ease the pain of 
living by steadily calling forth the 
highest in the worker, but which 
educate, liberate, and enrich even 
277 



Work and Play. 

while they exhaust. The strain of 
Herculean work is often hard to bear, 
but the man who feels it has the con- 
sciousness that he is 'doing a man's 
task in the brief day of life and earn- 
ing a man's reward. 

As work is higher toil, so is play 
higher than work. Toil rests upon 
submission, work on freedom, play 
on spontaneity and self-unconscious- 
ness. When toil becomes free, it is 
transformed into work ; and when 
work becomes spontaneous and in- 
stinctive it is transformed into play. 
The toiler is a slave, the worker a 
freeman, the man who plays an artist. 
When work rises into th,e sphere of 
creativeness, takes on new forms, 
breathes the vital spirit, becomes 
distinctive and individual, it is trans- 
formed into art. It is no longer 

accomplished under the law of neces- 
278 



Work and Play. 

sity ; it has become free. It is no 
longer full of strain and pain ; it is 
joyful. It is no longer the strenu- 
ous putting forth of power; it is the 
natural overflow of a rich and power- / 
ful nature. It is no longer a means ' 
to something apart from and beyond 
itself; it is a joy and satisfaction in 
itself The drudgery of apprentice- 
ship gives place to the independence 
and inventiveness of mastery ; the 
slavery to time and place, to model 
and method, is succeeded by the free- 
dom of art. To turn work into 
play is, therefore, the highest achieve- 
ment of active life ; and to rise, in 
any department of work, from ap- 
prenticeship and artisanship to the 
ease and freedom of the artist, is to 
attain the most genuine and satisfy- 
ing success which a life of activity 
offers. 

279 



Work and Play. 

Play is not free from fatigue, but 
it is free from friction, irritation, 
repression. It is in no sense indo- 
lent or easeful ; on the contrary it 
involves the most prodigal expendi- 
ture of strength. In games of com- 
petitive endurance a boy counts no 
putting forth of strength too severe, 
no subsequent fatigue too great ; the 
more exacting the test the deeper the 
satisfaction of sustaining it. The 
pleasure of play is not absence of 
effort, but the consciousness of free- 
dom ; not escape from weariness, but 
the feeling that one has put himself 
into the great game of life master- 
fully. When work becomes play it 
does not cease to be exhausting, but 
the weariness which comes with it 
is normal ; it does not cease to im- 
pose severe conditions on the worker, 
but these conditions are joyfully, in- 
280 



Work and Play. 

stead of reluctantly, accepted. The 
man who turns work into play, in- 
stead of being slothful, becomes 
notable by reason of the ardor and 
prodigality with which he pours 
himself out upon his tasks. For 
when the joy of working takes pos- 
session of a man, he ceases to take 
account of times and days and places ; 
he is always at work, for work is to 
him the normal form of activity. A 
full nature, putting itself forth with 
ease and power, and expressing that 
which is distinctive and individual 
in it in the work of mind and hand, 
— this is what the worker becomes 
when he is transformed into the 
artist. He not only loves his task, — 
the man in the working stage often 
loves his work, — but he individual- 
izes it, handles it freely, freshly, 
originally. He makes his own times, 
281 



Work and Play. 

develops his own methods, fashions 
his own tools. He deals with his 
material as if he had created it. He 
does not work by rule, but by in- 
stinct and reason ; he does not imi- 
tate, he creates ; he does not accept 
conventional styles and aims, he 
forms his own style and determines 
the ends to which he moves. The 
work which he does with his hands 
is not a thing outside of his con- 
sciousness and apart from his expe- 
rience ; it is a part of himself, for it 
is the expression of his own soul. 
It is his personal word to the world ; 
his revelation of the order of things 
as he sees it ; his symbol of the 
beauty and power and terror of life. 
Goethe said that his works, taken 
together, constituted one great con- 
fession ; and this is true of the 
works of all creative men. What 



Work and Play. 

they leave behind in language, picture, 
or stone is a part of themselves ; the 
expression of the immortal part. In 
the work of such a man as Rem- 
brandt, for instance, one feels the 
presence not so much of skill and 
talent as of a tremendous personal 
force ; the artist is hardly veiled by 
the art ; magnificent as the achieve- 
ment is, it hints at a power behind 
it of which it is a very imperfect rev- 
elation. The tragedy of King Lear 
affects us in the same way: it is 
colossal in itself, but the imagination 
cannot rest within the limits of the 
play ; it knows instinctively that it 
is in the presence of a creative energy 
more commanding than the majestic 
drama which it has fashioned. 



283 



chapter XXVII. 

Work and Beauty. 

TpEW events in the spiritual life of 
"^ the last two centuries have been 
more strikino; or richer in educational 
results than that rediscovery of Nature 
to the imagination and the aesthetic 
sense, the record of which, so far as 
English literature is concerned, is to be 
found between the letters of Gray and 
the verse of Whitman. A very large 
part of the natural world was alien, 
repellent, inimical to mediaeval men 
and to their successors far on into 
the modern period. The solitude of 
deep woods, the lonely heights of 
the great hills, the wildness of vast 
284 



Work and Beauty. 

moors, the rock-strewn shore of the 
sea, which appeal so powerfully to the 
modern imagination, were full of re- 
pulsion and terror to an imagination 
largely uneducated in this direction. 
From the days of Petrarch to those 
of Ruskin the knowledge of Nature 
has not been widened more radically 
than has the love of Nature and the 
ability to understand and appreciate 
the Protean aspects through which 
her elusive but pervasive beauty re- 
veals itself We seek what our an- 
cestors shunned, we love what they 
disliked, we are overwhelmed with 
beauty where they were oppressed 
with desolation and ugliness. 

The Alps refresh and lift us above 
ourselves ; the cliffs against which the 
sea dashes along the coast of Norway 
draw us from the ends of the earth ; 
the Scotch highlands fill us with fresh 
285 



Work and Beauty. 

life, and beguile us out of conventions 
into freedom and joy. To the men 
of the beginning of the last century 
these sublime aspects of the world 
were full of terror and repulsion. 

This extraordinary extension of 
human interest in and affection for 
Nature suggests that the standard of 
beauty is in her rather than in us, and 
that the training of the esthetic sense 
and of the imagination so constantly 
extends the reign of beauty through- 
out Nature as to afford ground for be- 
lieving that that reign is universal, and 
that when we fail to detect beauty in 
any aspect or form of natural life our 
perceptive powers are at fault. For 
Nature is saturated with beauty. It 
flows from her central life as truly as 
it discloses itself in her most delicate 
forms ; it is wrought into her very 
structure; it is not decorative merely, 
286 



Work and Beauty. 

it is organic ; it not only plays on the 
surface, it is diffused throughout her 
whole being. It is everywhere iden- 
tical with life and at one with power. 
This universal beauty, which shines 
in the stars, and blooms in the flowers, 
and builds in the woods cathedral 
aisles of pillared trunk and arching 
branch, lies largely in the perfect 
workmanship which secures symme- 
try, enforces subordination of the parts 
to the whole, holds the elements of 
vitality and form in perfect balance, 
and exacts implicit obedience to the 
law of the type. When Nature has 
finished her work on any particular 
form she has stamped it with some 
kind of beauty. We may not discern 
it at the moment, as our ancestors so 
often failed to see beauty where we 
see it at a glance ; but it is there if 
we have the intelligence to discover 
287 



Work and Beauty. 

it. For nothing is really finished 
until it is beautiful, and beauty is the 
final form toward which Nature con- 
stantly strives. She is entirely indif- 
ferent as to the quality of the material 
upon which she works ; she knows 
no distinctions or degrees ; everything 
is alike common and precious to her. 
The rarest flower that blooms is 
touched with a loveliness so delicate 
that it seems almost spiritual ; but 
the ferns, which fairly wall in the 
rough, wild-wood roads, are not less 
exquisitely shaped and moulded. 
Out of the mist and the light the 
glory of sunset strikes across the 
world, and the hearts of men are awed 
and purified as if they had looked 
through the gates of Paradise. 

It is clear that beauty is neither 
incidental nor decorative in Nature ; 
it is structural and organic. It marks 



Work and Beauty. 

the end of the creative process in 
every direction, and it reveals the final 
form. In like manner it must enter 
into the activity of men ; for it is not 
a charm which a man's work may 
possess or reject; it is essential to the 
wholeness and completeness of that 
work. Until he commands it his 
work is provisional and preparatory. 
It may be noble and useful, but it 
cannot be final and enduring. The 
fruits of toil are rarely beautiful ; 
they are sweet and sound, but they 
are rudimentary. The products of 
work are often, though not neces- 
sarily, beautiful ; but when work is 
transformed into play by becoming 
spontaneous, free, joyous, and indi- 
vidual, it rises at once into the world 
of the beautiful. Its product is no 
longer a piece of drudgery, it is a piece 
of art ; its maker is no longer an arti- 
19 289 



Work and Beauty. 

san, he is an artist. There is always 
at hand, therefore, a test of the quaHty 
of that which a man produces, a stand- 
ard measure of his success, a method 
of determining how far he has gone 
in that full and free development of 
himself in which the individual life 
finds its consummation. It must be 
constantly borne in mind that to be 
an artist in one's treatment and use 
of life it is not necessary that one 
should deal with any particular kind 
of material ; for distinction does not 
inhere in material, but in treatment. 
A man may use the finest marble 
with the mechanical and slavish dex- 
texity of an artisan, or he may carve 
the end of a half-burnt fagot with the 
spirit and force of an artist, as did 
Gasparo Becerra. The quality of art 
resides in the man, not in the sub- 
stance upon which he works. In 
290 



Work and Beauty. 

every occupation there are, therefore, 
all the stages which separate perfec- 
tion from crudity, finality of form 
from rudimentary beginning; and 
real success lies in securing that mas- 
tery which enables a man to do his 
work with freshness, freedom, and 
power ; to stamp it with individuality 
by making it the full and powerful 
expression of his own nature. 

Now, this mastery is not secured 
in any field of activity until beauty 
stamps the accomplished work and 
characterizes the manner in which it 
is done. In so far as work falls short 
of beauty it falls short of perfection. 
Slovenliness, crudity, indifference to 
finish of detail and soundness of 
workmanship, furnish infallible evi- 
dence that the man behind the work 
is still an apprentice ; he has not^come 
to maturity of insight and efFective- 
291 



Work and Beauty. 

ness. These defects show lack of 
conscience, lowness of aim, or defect 
in that training which every man 
ought to impose upon himself as 
a duty to himself. It is immoral to 
do clumsily that which we ought to 
do skilfully, to do carelessly that 
which ought to be done with con- 
summate patience, to be satisfied with 
ugliness when beauty is within reach. 
Our natures never fully express them- 
selves so long as the language they 
employ is limited in vocabulary and 
imperfect in grammar. The artist 
fails to convey his vision to us so 
long as the resources of his craft are 
partially beyond his grasp ; the pianist 
cannot move us until the instrument 
is so thoroughly mastered that it 
responds to his touch as if it were 
but an extension of his own organs 
of expression. In like manner the 
292 



Work and Beauty. 

full and free utterance of a man's 
deepest self is hindered, baffled, and 
limited in the exact degree in which 
he has neglected or failed to master 
the materials in which, and the tools 
with which, he works. Crudity which 
persists is evidence either of defect 
of quality in the workman or of lack 
of conscience in his work ; for the 
degree of thoroughness of workman- 
ship is the real test of morality in the 
worker. The man of conscience must 
reach the stage of beauty as certainly 
as the man of artistic quality, unless 
Nature fails to reinforce his effort with 
innate capacity. In the degree, there- 
fore, in which a man fails to stamp 
his work with beauty he fails in loy- 
alty to himself and in that real and 
enduring success which is as much 
a matter of duty as of opportunity. 
To become an artist in this sense is 
293 



Work and Beauty. 

not the privilege of the elect few ; it 
is the duty of the many. To fall 
short of it is to fail to produce the 
fruit which the tree was appointed 
to bear. 



294 



Chapter XXVIII. 

The Rhythmic Movement. 

' I ^HE poets felt the rhythmic ele- 
■*- ment in Nature in those far- 
off beginnings of time when the 
myth-makers told their stories. The 
flow of rivers, the procession of 
stars, the antiphony of day and night, 
the silent but inviolate order of the 
seasons, made the earliest men of 
observation and imagination aware 
of a rhythm to which all natural 
movements were set. Every kind of 
action betrays a melodic tendency, 
and there are days when one seems 
to hear the whole world, — become 
audible, like some great epic poem 
295 



The Rhythmic Movement. 

recited by winds and seas. The 
tinkle of the mountain brook, sound- 
ing all manner of clear, fresh notes, 
sings in the ear that h^s learned to 
distinguish the different tones and 
has become familiar with a gamut 
of sounds wholly alien from human 
vocalization or mechanism and yet 
full of a penetrating melodic quality. 
To one who has listened attentively 
to the tones of different kinds of 
trees, the play of winds upon the 
leaves has a harmonic effect, — one 
note supplied by the pine, another 
by the oak, and still another by the 
elm. On a warm afternoon the stir- 
ring of the pine's boughs is like the 
gentle breathing of the summer day ; 
as if the drowsy earth had fallen 
asleep and gave no sound save quiet 
breathing. The sea also has its 
music ; a magic music which has 
296 



The Rhythmic Movement. 

called men away from ease and safety 
and set them adrift with wind and 
tide since time began ; sometimes a 
siren song luring them to destruc- 
tion, sometimes that heroic music to 
which great adventures and splendid 
discoveries are set. 

The activities of men working to- 
gether with Nature betray the same 
rhythmic tendency ; as if Nature 
drew into the vast flow of things all 
lesser works and sounds. The sail- 
ors sing at their tasks by an instinct 
which feels, even when it does not 
understand, the steady pulsations of 
labor; and the cries and shouts and 
traditionary " yo-he-yo " on a ship 
that is being loaded bring with them 
all manner of reminiscences and hints 
of the sea; one seems to hear, in 
mimic tones, the singing of the spars, 
the crack of the sail suddenly catch- 
297 



The Rhythmic Movement. 

ing the breeze, the wild, free roar and 
rush of the waves swept on by wind 
with which they are in unison. And 
on clear nights, far inland, one can 
recall the rhythmic movement of the 
spars against the illimitable sky, and 
the vast, mysterious swell of the 
ocean, like the unconscious respira- 
tion of the earth itself. 

In like order, too, the hammers 
rang on the ship when keel and 
frame were put together in the ship- 
yard. And still farther back, the 
strokes of axes felling the trees were 
also set in some harmonic tune. On 
an October day, the ring of the axe 
at a distance in the woods sends out 
not only an inspiring note of health, 
power, and successful work, but there 
is areal music in therecurrent strokes. 
So, too, the swing of the scythe or 
the cradle distil a harmony of move- 
298 



The Rhythmic Movement. 

ment and sound which makes a har- 
vest field the oldest acted poem 
known among men ; there are few 
places where men seem so much a 
part of Nature, few tasks which seem 
to give them such real and genuine 
dignity. The sounds of flails falling 
on the grain spread on the floor of 
the barn beat like a great rhyme. 

Wherever energy is put forth in 
any kind of work with Nature the 
rhythmic quality, shared alike by the 
worker and the world which enfolds 
him, is revealed. The man who fells 
the oak with swift and steady stroke 
is conforming to a universal law 
when he puts regular intervals be- 
tween the successive blows of the 
axe ; he is unconsciously working in 
harmony with his own constitution 
and with the constitution of Nature. 
In the ground under his feet and in 
299 



The Rhythmic Movement. 

the woods which surround him, life 
moves in steady although inaudible 
pulsations. The vital currents re- 
cede and return with a regularity 
which is never varied ; the very 
leaves on the trees find their places 
in an order which science has de- 
tected ; the stars overhead return to 
their places with such exactness of 
movement that their position at any 
hour in the farthest future can be 
accurately determined. The tides 
come flooding up the bays and creeks 
with a regularity which twice a day, 
in ebb and flow, sings the song of 
the sea along the shores of every 
continent and island. The very 
clouds, so accidental and casual in 
appearance and disappearance, so 
dependent on varying and changing 
conditions, form and dissolve in an 
inviolable order which we are not 
300 



The Rhythmic Movement. 

yet intelligent enough to discover. 
And the storms, which seem to make 
the discords in the universal har- 
mony and to keep chance, chaos, and 
confusion potent in an ordered uni- 
verse, are now known to gather and 
disperse under a law of movement as 
fixed and harmonic as that which 
governs the tides. 

This rhythmic quality in Nature, 
this flowing movement which em- 
braces all material things and ex- 
presses itself through all life, becomes 
more evident and more significant 
with each advance of science. The 
more penetrating the gaze of science 
becomes, the more immaterial and 
mysterious become the structure of 
the earth and the forces which play 
through it. What once seemed fixed 
and stationary is now seen to be free 
and flowing ; matter more and more 
301 



The Rhythmic Movement. 

resolves itself into force ; and force 
becomes more and more subtle, per- 
vasive, and immaterial. And the 
more profoundly these forces are 
studied, the more distinctly does 
their substantial identity appear ; all 
forces tending to resolve into one 
force, of which all the different kinds 
of force are so many diverse but kin- 
dred forms of manifestation. So del- 
icate and sensitive is this force, — as 
revealed, for example, in electricity, — 
that the solid earth seems, in the long 
perspective through which science sees 
all created things, immaterial and spir- 
itual, responding to the lightest breath 
of motion, affected at vast distances 
by the least change of time or order. 
This flowing stream of force in which 
the material world has been resolved 
hints at a harmonious movement, 
which is not only a law of its own 
302 



The Rhythmic Movement. 

being, but which is also a condition 
of all growth and life. The elec- 
trical motor, twenty miles distant 
from the generator, does not receive 
the full charge of power until its 
movement is synchronous with that 
of the generator ; when the two are 
in exact harmony, power flows in 
full tide from the source to the in- 
strument. The law which governs 
the transmission of light, of heat, of 
sound, of power of all kinds, hints at 
the same deep and significant quality 
of rhythm throughout the universe, 
andat the truth which flows from it, — 
that to move with it is to be part of 
the fathomless movement of life which 
the universe reveals and illustrates. 



303 



Chapter XXIX. 

The Law of Harmony. 

'TpHIS marvellous truth concern- 
•*■ ing the structure of the world, 
divined by the poets and demon- 
strated by the scientists, is funda- 
mental in the life of man, embosomed 
in Nature, and allied to her in ways 
many and mysterious. The law of 
rhythm is illustrated in the individual 
and collective life of men so clearly 
that history might be rewritten from 
this standpoint. All the uncon- 
scious physical functions, in health, 
are rhythmical : the beating of the 
heart, the respiration, the circulation 
of the blood. The conscious physi- 
cal functions and activities tend to 
304 



The Law of Harmony. 

develop the same regular order and 
sequence, the same harmonic quality. 
The body adapts itself swiftly to fixed 
hours of exercise, of eating, and of 
sleep, and the physical expectation is 
so keen and firmly grounded that 
any change or violation of this order, 
once established, produces physical 
disturbance. And the physical habits 
are vitally related to the whole nature ; 
they become in the highest degree 
expressive of physical and moral 
character. A man's walk is uncon- 
sciously rhythmical ; his gestures, in- 
flections, tones, sentences, partake of 
the harmonic quality, which is deter- 
mined by his very structure. If he 
is a man of force, order, and produc- 
tiveness, his intellectual life shares in 
this harmonic movement, which be- 
gins in the physical and culminates 
in the spiritual sphere. 
20 305 



The Law of Harmony. 

He forms habits of thought which 
tend to become orderly and fruitful ; 
he discovers the hours when his nature 
is most responsive and suggestive, 
and husbands them ; he learns his 
own rhythm and consciously con- 
forms to it for the sake of the 
immensely increased freedom and 
power which flow from harmonic 
obedience. He develops his own 
method and style, for he learns that 
these apparently external things are 
really the breathings of his own deep- 
est life. This mysterious unity of 
a man's nature, this vital connection 
between what the man is and what 
he does, comes to light the moment 
we study any department of human 
expression. Metre, for instance, finds 
its physiological basis in respiration, 
and is determined largely by this 
physical action. The metre of 
306 



The Law of Harmony. 

"Hiawatha," which reads so easily that 
it seems to flow from the lips, owes this 
ease to its exact measurement of the 
expulsion of the air from the lungs. 
So nicely is it adjusted to the physi- 
cal act of breathing that one can re- 
cite lines which conform to it almost 
as easily as one can breathe ; a fact 
which explains its ancient popularity 
among makers and reciters of epic 
verse. Its flow makes it, also, the 
easy conquest of the memory. 

This illustration hints at the secret 
of the singular individuahsm of style, 
which, in the case of great writers, is as 
personal as the contour of the face or 
its coloring. Most men have phrases 
and forms of expression which tend 
to recur ; but they have no style, — 
no individual construction of sentences 
and choice of words. Style is har- 
monic ; it has order, sequence, flow ; 
307 



The Law of Harmony. 

it Is vitally expressive of the nature 
of the man who uses it. If he is 
a great writer, it is flesh of his flesh 
and bone of his bone. It is the con- 
fluence of his physical, intellectual, 
and spiritual forces ; it is the fusion 
of all his qualities ; it is his rhythm. 
We instinctively feel the posses- 
sion of the rhythmic quality in a 
speaker. For the man who finds 
his rhythm and surrenders himself 
to it, expresses himself with an 
ease, freedom, beauty, and charm 
which set us at rest with the first 
sentence, and cast a spell of a 
subtle enchantment over us ; the en- 
chantment of that harmonious rela- 
tion to one's time, task, materials, 
and self in which a fresh note always 
sounds. The instinct for harmony 
in every listener bears witness to its 
presence in the delight with which 
308 



The Law of Harmony. 

such a speaker is heard. We are 
won for a time out of all thought of 
ourselves, out of all antagonism, out 
of all care and sorrow, by the vi- 
bration of a single note of that 
deep harmony which pervades the 
universe. 

In this illustration lies the secret 
of the charm of art, and the secret 
also of individual power and produc- 
tiveness. Nature is not simply har- 
monious in appearance ; she is a unit 
to the very heart of her structure ; 
and all the forces which play through 
her are rhythmic and harmonic. The 
signs are manifold that we are stand- 
ing on the threshold of a new concep- 
tion of the material world and of 
unsuspected possibilities of relation- 
ship to it. The vast order of things 
which surrounds us is not dead mat- 
ter ; it is flowing force ; and force of 
309 



The Law of Harmony. 

a quality so high and sensitive that 
it presses fast on that which. we have 
hitherto called spiritual. That force 
affects us in numberless and mysteri- 
ous ways ; our bodies are in subtle 
communion and fellowship with Na- 
ture ; our minds are constantly as- 
sailed by influences of which we have 
hitherto taken no note. If sounds 
can be transmitted through water and 
through earth, not by tangible wires 
but by intangible vibrations, the inter- 
dependence of all forms of life as well 
as of forms of force must be far more 
complex and sensitive than we have 
suspected, and the relation of man to 
his world far more intimate. Every 
new step in this direction makes it 
more clear that susceptibility to deli- 
cate influence, responsiveness to uni- 
versal movements, and quality and 
receptivity to power depend on the 
310 



The Law of Harmony. 

harmonious relations of the part with 
the whole. Distance seems to be 
annihilated when movements are syn- 
chronous ; power does not travel from 
point to point ; it pervades all things 
at the same moment, and fills all that 
are open to its incoming. Clearly here 
are sources of vitahty which are not 
only inexhaustible, but with which we 
are only beginning to put ourselves in 
true relations. It is not an idle fancy 
that the race has before it enlarge- 
ments of its life and a widening of its 
interests of almost unsuspected range 
and importance. The old fable of 
Antaeus may read like a sublime 
prophecy two centuries hence. 

For the Power which sustains Na- 
ture is the same power which sustains 
men ; it is unlimited and illimitable. 
The vastness and glory of its mani- 
festations in the material universe 
3" 



The Law of Harmony. 

are but inadequate symbols of its 
possible manifestations through a 
humanity as obedient to its laws as 
is Nature. The man who violates 
the laws of his nature separates him- 
self from the source of life and power, 
and diminishes into the insulation of 
sterile individuality ; the man who 
lives in harmony with that Power, 
with Nature, and with himself, receives 
the full tide of vitality which flows 
without limit or pause from the crea- 
tive source. He is fed by invisible 
rivulets, he is nourished by unseen 
ministrants ; health, sanity, fertility, 
and joy are his by the very constitu- 
tion of Nature. There has been but 
one life, so far, lived among men which 
has been in perfect harmony with the 
laws of life and in constant contact 
with the sources of vitality. In that 
life Nature worked as a co-operative 
312 



The Law of Harmony. 

force ; language was as simple, as 
beautifal, and as final as the stars 
and winds, the flowers and harvest, 
which furnished it with the deepest 
and richest illustration ; thought bore 
the cumulative fruit of truth ; conduct 
rose to the level of aim ; and power 
flowed from it with immortal fulness. 
As time reveals its essential unity 
with the divine order, its beauty, its 
simplicity, its health, and its immeas- 
urable range become more and more 
clear. It is not only the divinest life 
known to us ; it is also the sanest and 
the most natural. It interprets Na- 
ture as no other life interprets her, 
because Nature and this transcendent 
Life obeyed the same laws and moved 
to the same ends. 



3^3 



Chapter XXX. 

The Prophecy of Nature. 

TF these brief chapters have con- 
veyed even a faint impression 
of the duration, the intimacy, and the 
importance of the relations between 
Nature and men, they have made it 
clear that those relations are not only 
the oldest recorded facts in the his- 
tory of the race, but that they are 
also cumulative in their influence and 
prophetic in their character. The 
race life and the individual life have 
alike received the deepest education 
through these relationships, which 
have become, as time has passed, 
more intimate, complex, and myste- 
rious ; phenomena have come more 
314 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

and more within the range of intelli- 
gence, law has made itself increas- 
ingly clear and controlling to the 
investigating mind ; and force has 
yielded its secrets with growing 
frankness and made itself a willing 
servant. And this whole revelation 
of Nature, carrying with it the edu- 
cation of the race, has steadily risen 
in quality and significance from what 
we have hitherto called the material 
to what we have called the spiritual ; 
two words which our ignorance has 
set in apposition, but which really 
describe different aspects of the one 
indivisible life which flows through 
all forms. Nature is no longer an 
orderly succession of phenomena 
alone; she is also a symbol of man's 
life ; she is no longer a material ap- 
pearance, she is also a spiritual real- 
ity; she is no longer the shell from 
315 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

which the fully developed man has 
broken away, she is also a sublime 
prophecy of the unbroken and unin- 
terrupted life. 

An educational process is pro- 
phetic in its very nature ; it is 
always and everywhere a prepara- 
tion; it implies incomplete develop- 
ment; it involves the possibility of 
growth ; it assumes time, capacity, 
opportunity, material for work. The 
school, the college, and the university 
not only affirm the need of training 
and the capacity to receive it, but 
also the opportunity to use it. The 
art school is conclusive evidence of 
the existence of the artist and the 
practice of the art. And not only , 
does the educational process affirm 
its reality as a thing of supreme im- 
portance ; it also affiards a measure 
of the dignity and magnitude of the 
316 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

Work for which it prepares. An 
occupation which involves rudimen- 
tary manual skill requires a brief and 
superficial training; but the mas- 
terly practice of a great art necessi- 
tates long continued and exhaustive 
training. The more difficult the work 
to be done, the more exacting and 
fundamental the education required. 
Now, no one can study carefully 
the education which men have re- 
ceived from intercourse with Nature 
without a deepening sense of its 
rigor, its complexity, and its pene- 
trating power. It has searched the 
race through and through ; tested 
its strength ; exacted its obedience ; 
tried it by suffering, self-denial, and 
death; made inexorable demands on 
its patience, fidelity, intelligence, and 
character. As the race has measur- 
ably received this training the stand- 

sn 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

ards have been steadily raised ; as 
intellectual and moral fibres have 
toughened the tests have steadily 
become more searchhig ; a stage of 
development gained does not mean 
rest, but further advance. The 
educational process is not only un- 
ending, but it constantly grows more 
severe. Nature is clearly treating 
the race as if it were immortal, and 
training the individual as if he 
were imperishable. This marvel- 
lous educational process, steadily 
advancing in complexity and spirit- 
uality as men grow in knowledge, 
does not even give us pause to cal- 
culate its rate of movement or to 
record its results. It is indifferent as 
to present achievement ; it resist- 
lessly presses toward the future, — 
every new skill detecting at once a 
new opportunity ; every new fact 
318 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

bringing with it the prediction of 
some other fact ; every summit 
gained opening a wider horizon of 
work and achievement. In the very 
heart of this fathomless and measure- 
less training lies the affirmation of 
the immortality of the nature that is 
trained; in the complexity and sever- 
ity of this inexorable education lies the 
affirmation of the duration and the 
dignity of the work and the life for 
which it prepares. 

As this process of training becomes 
more distinct and definite it also 
becomes more clear that there is in 
every man a capacity for receiving 
education which is practically with- 
out limits either as to time or range. 
One stage of training succeeds to an- 
other without pause; and no sooner 
is skill secured in one direction than 
it begins to effect results in other and 
319 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

unforeseen directions. The hand 
that holds a tool is part of an organ- 
ism which constantly affects it and 
upon which it as constantly reacts. 
As that hand is held to its task, the 
eye, the will, the nature of the man 
behind it are all involved in its work. 
Aims are slowly modified, the spirit 
which goes into the work deepens 
and is often entirely changed, the 
soul of the worker merges more and 
more with his skill, until the work 
becomes an expression of his soul. 
Beginning with mere manual dex- 
terity, put forth for material rewards, 
the worker becomes more interested, 
more intelligent, more artistic ; con- 
science presides over his task ; the 
imagination is awakened, and the 
man is transformed by degrees from 
the artisan to the artist. His skill 
has become spontaneous, his aims 
320 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

have become spiritual. He is no 
longer satisfied with wages of money ; 
he demands wages of life as well, — 
growth, freedom, power, influence. 

Thus the educational process goes 
on in the individual ; and the furthef 
it is carried the more distant seems 
the end. Advance in skill and 
power does not mean pause or satis- 
faction ; it means clearer vision of 
higher things still to be attained, 
deeper discontent with present 
achievement, an expansion of intel- 
ligence and heart which nothing with- 
in the range of the education of this 
present life can satisfy. In the 
nature of man, as in Nature herself, 
there is a vast movement set toward 
finer skills and higher attainments, 
without provision for arrest of activ- 
ity, without recognition of finalities 
of equipment, without signs of the 

21 321 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

limit of the movement or of the ebb 
of the tide which carries it forward. 
That unfolding of all the possibili- 
ties of the human spirit which is 
accomplished by growth and which 
is best described by the word culture 
has been carried far in the history 
of the race and in that of many in- 
dividuals, but it has never yet been 
completed ; on the contrary, the fur- 
ther it is carried, the richer its possi- 
bilities become. The life we now 
live is primarily and in its essence 
an educational process ; and whatever 
enlargement, deliverance, and beauty 
come to us in any other life must 
be through larger oppoicunity, freer 
play of power, and flawless achieve- 
ment. No man who has really 
looked into life can imagine a 
heaven which is not, in some form, 
harmonious and perennial growth. 
322 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

This element of prophecy is not 
only present in the educational pro- 
cess which Nature provides for men ; 
it is also written on her own organi- 
zation and movement. The great 
conception of development has not 
only introduced a new idea of order, 
progression, and intelligibility in our 
thought of the world about us ; it 
has also vitalized that world, spirit- 
ualized it, and discovered the direc- 
tion of its movement. When the 
universe was a mass of matter in the 

old material sense of the word, a 

mass of dirt, — - made up of parts of 
which the mutual relations were not 
apparent; distinct from man and 
unrelated, save by antagonism, to his 
life and growth, — it was rational to 
doubt its spiritual significance and 
to question its educational value. 
But the conception of the unity 
3^3 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

and interdependence of all created 
things, of their gradual advance from 
the germ to the perfected organism, 
of the vast unfolding of all things 
through the deepest and most vital 
relationships, of the rise of type 
above type in an ascending grada- 
tion, of the constant reaction of the 
individual upon his surroundings and 
of the general conditions upon the 
individual, of the dependence of man 
upon Nature and of the interpretation 
of Nature by man ; in a word, of the 
measureless and fathomless movement 
which has clothed the universe with 
beauty as with a garment, made man 
master of himself by unfolding his 
nature through knowledge, skill, char- 
acter, set him in living relations to 
a living universe, — this conception 
carries with it the knowledge that man 
and Nature are not in antagonism, 
324 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

that matter and spirit are not in appo- 
sition, that mortal and immortal are 
not contrasting words, that time and 
eternity are not different. There is 
one all-inclusive order which includes 
man as completely as it includes his 
world ; there is one sublime force, 
of which all forces are manifestations, 
which flows through all things and 
by which all things are sustained ; 
there is one inclusive movement, the 
record of which lies plainly written 
in the history of man and of Nature ; 
it has never paused, it will never 
pause, and its direction is from the 
lower to the higher, from the mate- 
rial to the spiritual ; there is one 
inexhaustible life, which floods the 
universe with vitality and makes it 
a living order, and which forever 
renews man by forever unfolding him 
in intelligence and power. To com- 
325 



The Prophecy of Nature. 

prehend that order and ally himself 
with it, to recognize that life and 
hold himself open to it, — this is 
the philosophy of sound, deep, pro- 
ductive living. 

This is the spiritual significance 
of man and Nature under a law of 
development. Progression binds 
them together in divine fellowship 
and lifts their relationship from 
plane to plane in an endless ascen- 
sion ; immortal growth is the proph- 
ecy which Nature makes for man. 



THE END. 



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